


Necessary Evils

by Barb Cummings (Rahirah)



Series: The Barbverse [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Bloodplay, F/M, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:59:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 37
Words: 315,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rahirah/pseuds/Barb%20Cummings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of sex, violence, violent sex, pizza, gods, demons, ex-demons, road trips, gratuitous Hank Summers, black magic, white magic, sorta greyish magic, felonies and misdemeanors, Eskimo kisses, spontaneous combustion, ethical dilemmas, ex-lovers, Willow Gone Bad, wrecked furniture, the importance (or not) of the soul, the care and feeding of social workers, insanity, prison bitches, a dead Beatle, ice cream therapy, a disappointing performance by Man U., life after death, undeath after life, the folding of laundry, dismemberment, job hunting, Ultimate Evil, blood play, channel surfing, true love and (ooh, that word) redemption, in which is explored the question of whether or not one Buffy Anne Summers, vampire slayer extraordinaire, and one William the Bloody, vampire of infinite heart and limited ethics, can reach a certain degree of mutual accommodation after diverse discourses and considerable ass-kicking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to "A Raising In the Sun." However, all you need to know is that Willow brought Buffy back to life using Dawn's blood and William's soul, and Buffy does not remember heaven. n.b. I started writing this in September 2001, when "Amends" was the only canonical source of information on the First Evil, and finished it in May of 2003. Naturally I got Jossed a number of times in the course of writing. Some of these inconsistencies I revised to accord with the show's canon before completing the story. Others I decided to leave as is, specifically the First Evil's appearances as living people, and the fact that some of the Harbingers in this story are capable of speech.
> 
> Thanks to Aurelio Zen for lettin' me play with her Zagros demon, and many, many thanks to all the folks at the Redemptionista Writers Group for beta reading.

He didn't want to wake up.

Too late. Consciousness had hold of him now, and the sweet bliss of knowing who he was dissolved into the familiar crawling itch inside his head. Tanner huddled inside his ratty sleeping bag, only his eyes visible. (Important, very important; the Things couldn't get through the cloth.) Sun was down. When no place was yours, no place was proof against the things that prowled the Sunnydale night, it was much safer to sleep during the day. No one visible. Which didn't mean much; he could only see the invisible ones sometimes. Jerk the zipper down, back up, down again. (Very important.) Sit up, slowly, while the fingers crawled through his brain. Check the perimeter.

Still in the park, in the little cave formed by the overhanging myrtle bushes. Tanner twisted round in the sleeping bag, counting off: the rock with the hole in it. The yellow rubber dog. The three matchbooks with one match left, the one on the right-hand end of the back row, bound together with red string. Wards and bounds, marking his territory. Some of the others used crosses, one, two, three, four, planted in the ground, head, feet, one to each side.

No crosses for him. What point when any smart vampire could use a stick and knock them away? He had his own methods. Sometimes he thought he remembered which ones were really magic (The bundle of rowan twigs? The phonograph needle which had only been used once, to play Scriabin's... what?) The knowledge was far away now. Twitching, itching... time to hunt. Past time. He'd put it off too long already. He'd be no help to the others if he didn't do it soon. He struggled out of the sleeping bag and rolled it up, tucking the charms away in its folds as he did so, muttering the right words in the right order.

His outpost was near the playground, a good safe spot, well-lit even at night. Near the squat cinder-block building which guarded the entrance to the public pool. There were showers in there, and bathrooms, and sometimes in the summer you could get good stuff from the lost and found box in the lifeguards' dressing room. The parking lot by the pool house was almost empty, just one lone motorcycle parked there. Tanner eyed it warily as he walked by, lest it pounce. It growled, but it was well-trained, he could see that. It only watched him as he walked up to the pool house.

The lock on the main door was broken and the parks and recreation people had given up trying to replace it long time ago--gangs, they said, or vagrants. Everyone knew it was really vampires. The others just took advantage of the vampires' vandalism, jackals following lions to the watering hole.

What vampires wanted with a men's room Tanner didn't know--probably the same thing he did, a convenient place to wash up when you wanted to pass for human. Look clean and you could get into the Espresso Pump, scavenge some change, spend the evening drinking coffee. They couldn't see the crawling in your head if you were clean.

Light filtered in from the parking lot outside through high windows paned in heavy pebbled glass. Tanner picked his way past the front desk, placing his feet just so on the spiderweb of cracks in the echoing hall. Men's showers and dressing rooms were on one side, bathroom on the other. Faint scents coiled about him, plucking at his coat sleeves. Chlorine and wet concrete and stale caramel corn, whispering ghosts of summer. A sharp, astringent scent--a stranger--nipped at his ankles. There was water running in the bathroom already. A dark shape loomed over by the sinks. He realized what the sharp smell was. Peroxide.

The man at the sink straightened carefully to avoid banging his head on the tap and sluiced water out of his hair with both hands. He looked over his shoulder, sized up and dismissed Tanner in a glance, and went back to washing the excess bleach out of his hair. He had one of those little traveling shaving kits laid out on the edge of the sink. Tanner recognized him as someone he'd seen around downtown Sunnydale before. One of the night people. Vaguely punkish, Doc Martens or motorcycle boots, black jeans and T-shirt and a black leather longcoat which must have been damned expensive when it was new. And a definite aura of don't-fuck-with-me.

Older memory surfaced--that too-handsome face a-snarl with rage. Tanner's hand went up, touching his nose gingerly. It still hurt when the weather changed. The blond guy falling, strings cut, puppet no more use. But it had hurt _him_ first. Tanner's first impulse was to back away, let the guy leave before going in himself. Second impulse... "You were there. When the air bled lizards."

The blond guy frowned. "No offense, mate, but I lost my taste for deciphering raving loonies a year or two back. Go ahead and use the loo if that's what you're here for."

Tanner didn't move. Manna from heaven. Guy here, alone. Guy'd hurt him. The dogs wouldn't bark for him. _That was the singular occurrence, Watson._ His fingers jerked at his sides. Three steps. A grab. Fingers twined in bone-white hair. The right words in the right order. Faster than lizards flew, the strings would be cut again and for awhile he, Tanner, would be whole, the crawling itching twitching stilled... Then he heard the voices behind him, out by the front desk. He froze.

The guy at the sink looked up again, irritation twisting his features, and shook water out of his newly-bleached hair. He cocked his pale head to one side, listening. "You expecting company?"

Tanner shook his head, mute, backing into the room and sliding along the wall past the urinals, towards the stalls in back. The blond guy, though obviously tense, took his sweet time turning off the tap, packing up his razor and shaving cream and tossing the plastic gloves and bleach package into the big metal trash can in the corner. That was fine with Tanner. He could play macho. There had been a time when he could have done the same, said a word, made a gesture--but the magic took time now, time to gather scattered thought and marshal them in neat rows. Time you didn't get in a fight. Tanner would hide in the bathroom stalls and if it was human punks maybe they wouldn't find him, and if it wasn't...

...maybe they wouldn't be hungry enough to want him too.

******

The voices echoed down the damp concrete halls. "Where'd he go?"

"Men's showers. Geez, what stinks in here? Smells like a laundry."

Footsteps in the short hallway, louder, closer. Spike heard scrabbling noises as the homeless guy, whoever he was, clambered desperately up onto the toilet seat, clinging to the wooden partition. Spike sighed and finished his washing-up, not bothering to look at the big sheet of burnished stainless steel they had bolted to the wall in lieu of a mirror. Too dark to see a reflection, even if he'd possessed one, and he had a lot of practice at doing without.

They sauntered around the corner and into the bathroom, yellow-eyed, faces twisted into nightmare shapes. The only heartbeat in the room was the one he could hear thudding violently away in the stall at the back of the room. Spike relaxed. A gang of human marauders he might have had trouble with. Other vampires he could handle. Not that, in the case of these two, he really wanted to soil his hands.

It wasn't unusual for a vampire to pick a style they liked and stick with it for decades, if not forever. Spike did it himself. But sod all, why did so many of them have to pick a look that screamed 'complete git'? The one in front was middling tall and olive-complected, with dark curly hair in a sort of brillo-explosion halo. He was wearing a collection of gold chains and a lemon yellow polyester leisure suit, horrifically wide lapels and all. Very likely the same suit he'd been turned in; that stuff was even more indestructible than the average vampire. The other one was fortyish and balding, with a sort of hunched, apologetic look even in game face. His grey suit was unobjectionable, if dull, and plenty of living humans of his sort would have had the exact same air of having slept in it for at least a week. He looked like an undead chartered accountant.

The first vampire pointed to the stalls. "He's right in--" Then he noticed. His lips twisted in disgust over bared fangs. "Spike."

"None other," Spike replied, squeezing a judicious amount of hair gel into one palm. He set the tube down on the sink, rubbed the gel briskly into his hair and ran a comb through the unruly curls, testing deftly with the other hand to ensure everything was in place. The patent-leather look was easier to keep up, but he'd gotten bored with it. Besides, Buffy had made the off-hand comment after she'd gotten back that she liked the new look. He'd been too embarrassed to admit that the 'new look' had originally been the result of a week's worth of not giving a shit, but rabid wolverines couldn't have made him go back to slicking it completely flat after that. Oh, well. What time he lost getting the hair right he saved on not hanging about waiting for his nails to dry.

"What the hell are you doing here?" the disco-era vampire asked.

Spike rinsed his comb off and put it and the hair gel back into his shaving kit. "Taking advantage of this brilliant invention that came in last century. Indoor plumbing. P'raps you've heard of it?" He sniffed ostentatiously, wrinkled his nose and turned off the faucet. "Guess that would be a 'no'."

Disco-Vamp ignored the insult. "Look, in your condition I don't blame you hanging around and hoping for scraps, but this one's ours."

The smaller one smiled. Nasty expression. "If you're nice we'll let you have sloppy seconds once he's good and dead."

Spike studied him with interest, wondering if he looked that purely evil with a grin on. He hoped so. With a martyred sigh, he pulled his duster off the hook by the sink and shrugged into it. The black leather flared dramatically about his shoulders as he turned to confront the interlopers again. Grinning. The two of them flinched, stepping back in spite of themselves, and then took a belligerent half-step forward. Damn, but he loved doing that. "Just had to do it, didn't you? Here's poor Spike, completely biteless, and you lot come barging in and not only want to snuff someone right in front of me, you want to tell me all about it in nauseating detail."

Disco looked at Accountant. Accountant looked at Disco and pursed his thin, colorless lips. "I suppose that is inconsiderate of us, considering your... condition."

"Bloody right it's inconsiderate. Think of my feelings." Spike picked up his shaving kit and tucked it into his duster pocket. "D'you think I enjoy playing white hat?" His grin broadened as his hand found the other item in the pocket. "You could have shut your gob and I could have left nice and peaceable, don't ask, don't tell, but no--here you go, forcing my hand." He withdrew his hand, now grasping a wooden stake, from his pocket and swung it in a short sharp arc that terminated in Accountant's chest. "Downright rude, I call it."

Accountant had time for one wounded glance downward before crumbling into dust. "Can't abide bad manners," Spike said cheerfully.

Disco roared, batting the stake out of his hand with one lightning blow and shoving him into the wall. All right, this wanker was older than he looked. Older, and faster, and stronger... ah, well, keep things interesting. His own eyes flaring gold, Spike pushed off the wall and launched himself at the other vampire with a joyful roar. He landed two solid punches, took three, got the bastard into a headlock and rammed his forehead into the edge of the sink a couple of times. Disco managed to hook a foot around his ankle and send them both tumbling to the ground, rolling over and over with fangs snapping inches from one another's throats. Spike freed one arm long enough to flail for the dropped stake. Disco grabbed him before he could get a grip on it, heaved him up into the air and slammed him into the wall by the trash can. Spike dropped to the ground, head spinning. Bloody hell. This wanker was as strong as Angel, and he'd never been able to take Angel in a fair fight...

...which just meant he'd have to fight dirty.

Disco leaped for him. Spike rolled to the side, grabbed the fifty-gallon steel drum and heaved it upwards, catching Disco full in the face. Disco staggered and the drum fell back to the ground with an ear-splitting CLANG! Spike grabbed the bigger vampire's ankles and yanked his feet out from under him, flipping him head over heels into the still-rocking trash can. Before Disco's scream of rage ended Spike had flung himself across the floor and grabbed the stake. Disco's struggles tipped the can over completely, and as he came scuttling out backwards, Spike drove the stake into his back before he had a chance to get his head free.

Spike knelt there beside the pile of dust which had been Disco for a moment, wondering idly why he always started breathing during a fight. "Now that," he said with great satisfaction, "is the way to wake up of an evening." Shaking off his game face, he fished his lighter and cigarettes out of another pocket, tapped one out of the pack and lit up. After a few contented puffs he got to his feet, went over to the paper towel dispenser and repaired the damage the scuffle had done to his clothes. As an afterthought he set the trash can upright. "Oi, mate," he yelled towards the back of the bathroom, "All yours."

No answer. Spike cocked his head to one side. Funny, he couldn't hear the bloke's heartbeat any longer. Had he had a stroke or something, keeled over in the stall? Curious, walked back and opened the door.

There was no one there.

He stood there for a moment, scratching his head. Either the blighter had walked out while the two of them were fighting, and he hadn't noticed, or a dimensional portal had opened up and swallowed him whole. In Sunnydale, both possibilities were equally likely, and which one it was was no business of his. Spike shrugged, and strolled out whistling.

******

The lion roared. Something went flying, sharp baseball-bat crack against the wall. Smack and thud of fist meeting flesh, gasps and snarls, right outside the door it sounded like. Trapped. Fear knit the frayed edges of his thoughts together, and he looked up at the windows, but there was no escape in that direction. He stood balanced precariously on the toilet seat, gripping the edge of the partition with both hands, layers of heavy flaking paint rough under his thumbs.

There was another guy standing beside him in the stall. Tanner didn't remember him walking in. Maybe the guy'd been invisible. The guy didn't have eyes, but that was OK. Or not OK, but Tanner didn't mind because he was missing things too, more important things than eyes. An eerie calm settled over everything. He couldn't hear the fight going on outside. Couldn't hear anything. Except the guy with no eyes.

"Come with me, Tanner," the guy without eyes said. Some niggling inner voice told him that he ought to be afraid, but the calm felt so good, novocaine for the soul... Tanner shrugged. Not like he had anything better to do. The guy with no eyes opened the door to the stall and walked out, and Tanner followed him. The two combatants were locked together, motionless, in the center of the floor. Be damned. The blond guy was a lion too. "Observe," the guy without eyes said. "Two creatures of perfect evil, existing only to bring..."

"Death," Tanner interrupted. Nasty sharp pointed teeth.

The guy without eyes shook his head, impatient. "No. Death is neither good nor evil. Death... is. They exist to bring pain. Destruction. Chaos. Death is only one means to that end." He stood there, contemplating the frozen tableau. "It's all part of the balance, you see."

"He hurt me," Tanner agreed. Then he frowned. "He helped me."

The guy with no eyes nodded. "Yes. The balance has been perturbed." Tanner shivered. Bad, very bad, worlds out of kilter. The evil geometry of the monkey bars on the playground, black and stark against the sunset.

"You understand," the eyeless man murmured. "Balance must be restored."

"I--the others," Tanner choked out. "Gotta hunt for 'em."

The eyeless man paused, then nodded. "Yes. I know. That's why we have chosen you. Come with me. There is much yet to do."

******

"I look like a ratbag."

Dawn and Willow, who'd been poring over their respective homework in the Summers' living room, exchanged cautious looks. The words had been spoken in tones of hushed revelation. Buffy was standing in the middle of the Summers' room, sans makeup, her hair pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck in what Dawn referred to as 'Buffy's skinned weasel look'. She was staring down at her stunning ensemble of baggy sweatsuit and grungy tennis shoes as if she'd really noticed what she was wearing for the first time in weeks. Buffy was clean, Buffy was neat, but Buffy was a far cry from the older sister Dawn remembered agonizing for two hours over what to wear to a fifteen-minute appearance at the Bronze.

Dawn looked up from her exquisitely boring English homework. If she'd realized that her class-cutting last spring would result lowering her GPA to the point that she didn't qualify for AP classes, she'd... well, she'd still have cut the classes, but... She gave her sister a once-over. "Yeah, you sure do." A demon of mischief prompted her to add, "So what? It's only patrol, right? You're gonna go out and get covered in demon guts and vampire dust anyway." She paused before delivering the coup de grace. "Besides, Spike's seen you look way rattier than this."

Buffy frowned, not rising to the bait. Darn. "If I'm going out, I should change." She reached up and touched her cheek tentatively. "I don't even have any lipstick!"

Dawn could have jumped on the coffee table and cheered; Buffy showing any sign of interest in mundane things like what she looked like was cause for major celebration. "So go buy some," she said, maintaining a tone of sisterly boredom. "That's what I do."

Her sister's hazel eyes sharpened for an instant in a 'my little baby sister is wearing lipstick?' expression. Honestly, sometimes Buffy acted as if she were still twelve. But she didn't go into freakout mode, just frowned some more. "It's not in the budget," she said, and turned and climbed slowly back up the stairs.

"You could borrow some of mine," Willow called after her.

Buffy turned for a moment, her eyes already regaining that distant, abstracted look which Dawn had grown to hate with a passion in the last month. "Thanks, Will."

"You know, I could come along on patrol tonight if--"

Buffy didn't wait for her to finish. "Spike and I can handle it."

Willow bit her lower lip, her eyes suspiciously bright, and bent over her own book as Buffy disappeared up the stairs. Embarrassed, Dawn tried to lose herself in the exciting compositional possibilities of the gerundive. It didn't work. The silence in the living room grew thicker and gluier by the moment, until Dawn was sure that if she did get up the nerve to say anything, the words would be trapped like flies in amber and go unheard. The knock on the door was a positive relief. Dawn flung her notebook to the floor and ran for the door. "Hey, Spike! You're late."

"'Lo, Bit," Spike said, breezing in past her. He was carrying a lethal-looking axe over one shoulder and looked to be in a very good mood. "Ran into some old mates, had to catch up, have a pint, kill them, the usual." He peered up the stairs. "Where's your sis? Don't tell me the Slayer's still powdering her nose."

"Weird though it may seem after weeks of Amish Buffy, yeah," Dawn said. "She'll be down in a minute."

"Buffy!" Spike yelled up the stairs. "Get your arse in gear!"

"Get stuffed, Spike!"

"Promises, promises!"

Dawn snickered. "Or maybe she'll stay up there for an hour to piss you off." She went back to her chair and draped herself sideways over both arms, in the hopes that the unorthodox study position would make her homework slightly more interesting. It didn't.

Spike followed her into the living room and began roaming restlessly about, picking up pieces of bric-a-brac off the TV and setting them down again, staring at the family photos on the walls, and finally coming to rest on the end of the couch opposite Willow. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sat there for a few minutes, jogging one booted foot against the coffee table. "Hullo, Will," he said at last.

"Spike," Willow said neutrally. The vampire's expressive face fell and Dawn winced, but before anything further could be said Spike's keen ears had picked up a noise upstairs and he had turned away. A moment later Dawn heard Buffy's footsteps on the stairs.

Buffy's clothes had all been donated to Goodwill after her death. So far she'd been hewing to the constraints of The Budget with iron determination to make the utilities payments and continued apathy towards fun in general. Dawn, on the other hand, had shamelessly played on their father's tendency to resort to retail therapy as a method of assuaging guilt feelings before he returned to L.A. As a result, Buffy was not entirely without wardrobe, even if, so far, she'd been restricting her dressing up to job interviews. She wasn't dressed up now--at least, unless you compared her blue tank top and jeans to what she'd been wearing earlier. She'd done her hair up a little differently, too, and was wearing a touch of Willow's lipstick, but the big difference was in her expression.

You couldn't really say Buffy's face lit up when she saw Spike. Not the way Spike lit up when he saw Buffy--it was painfully obvious that no matter what he said about accepting that there could never be anything between him and her sister, he was still hopelessly in love with her. But Spike seemed to light some kind of a fire under Buffy nonetheless; the distant look hardly ever crept into her eyes when he was around. She looked _ interested_, as though being alive were more than just a duty she had to carry out. Maybe it was only because Spike's boundless supply of nervous energy tended to fizz over and infect everyone in the same room. But maybe, Dawn thought, the fire was starting to smoulder a little even when he wasn't around.

"About bloody time," Spike said, bouncing to his feet. "Why it takes a frigging hour to apply a square inch of face paint..."

Buffy rolled her eyes. "Like you have room to talk. Back in the day you wore more eyeliner than I do."

Spike snorted. "Yeh, and I put it on in three minutes flat with no mirror."

"Walk ten miles uphill through the snow, too? Let's go, smartass."

Spike picked up his axe. "Later, Bit. We'll bring you some demon guts."

Buffy turned back for a moment. "Dawn, do what Will tells you to for once, OK? Will, if..."

"I'll be fine," Willow said tightly. She pulled her feet up under her and buried her nose in her sociology text. "Not like I'm out doing anything that might be _dangerous_, unlike you and Spike." There was a little more resentment in the last word than seemed warranted by anything Spike had done since entering the house, and the muscles in the vampire's jaw twitched as he visibly bit back a retort.

Buffy's frown returned for an instant, more perplexed than angry. "I'm sorry, Will, it's just that... I mean, you're not really recovered yet, are you? Look, I have an interview tomorrow morning, but I'm free after. What say we meet for lunch? We'll do the whole girly thing."

Willow hesitated, then nodded, summoning up a smile. "Sure."

Reassured, Buffy smiled back and went after Spike, who was already standing impatiently at the door. Willow's smile faded as she watched them leave. "Do the whole girly thing, sure," she muttered, adding, almost too low for Dawn to hear, "Not good enough to go on patrol, but when lunch is on the line call Willow!"

At least she had the tact not to bring up babysitting duty. "Hey, I _never_ get to go on patrols," Dawn pointed out. "You're just, like, recuperating from the resurrection spell, and then you'll be back on the front lines."

The witch retrieved her smile for a second, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I'm totally recuperated now. If Buffy ever decides she can stand to be in the same room with the awful person who brought her back to life for ten minutes at a time. She sure forgave you and Spike fast enough for helping me." She ran one hand over the arm of the couch, picking absently at the spot where the upholstery was beginning to wear a little thin. "But it's not your fault, I guess. I shouldn't bite Spike's head off." She looked rueful. "Cookie time again."

Dawn chewed on the end of her pencil. If Buffy'd remained equally distant from all of them Willow might not be taking this so hard. She didn't understand the continuing tension between Willow and her sister herself, or why Spike hadn't come in for the same treatment. She suspected Buffy didn't know either. Maybe didn't even realize it was there. Her sister could be stunningly clueless when it came to understanding her own reactions, much less other people's. "She's going to be in a restaurant with you for more than ten minutes tomorrow."

Willow sighed and tucked her hair behind her ears, picking up her textbook once more. "It's a start."


	2. Necessary Evils by Barb C

"...so frustrating!" Buffy said as they went down the front walk. "Anya keeps saying I should charge for slaying, and I can't even begin to list the number of ways that's deeply wrong..."

Spike looked thoughtful. "I dunno, pet, there might be something in that. Can't you hit up the Council of Wankers? They pay Rupert a pretty penny. I know, I nicked his bank book once."

Buffy made a face. "Giles is looking into that, actually, but I'm not even sure I want to take the Council's money. They'd own me again."

"So will anyone who signs your paycheck," Spike countered. Buffy made another face, complete with gruesome choking noises. He shrugged. "Better the devil you know."

"I'd feel a lot better taking your advice if your idea of financial planning wasn't 'beat up demon, take its stuff, and hope it's got something worth pawning'."

He chuckled. "Don't knock it, pet, it keeps me in blood and fags. You could do worse than to go in for a bit of looting yourself. If you're going to be killing the slime-covered set right and left anyway, you might as well be doing it for fun _and_ profit."

Buffy frowned and pursed her lips. "We're getting on the train which is not going there now." Spike was only half joking, and she didn't want to think too hard about which half. He didn't kill humans any longer, but it was little things like this which made it impossible for her to forget the whole absence of soul business. And the annoying part was that she felt bad about shooting him down when he really thought he was making a good suggestion. Time for a blatant change of subject. "So where did you get this monstrosity, anyway?" she asked, eying the motorcycle parked in the driveway. She wasn't up on motorcycles, but if there was a kind particularly suited to vampires with a basic black fetish, this was one of them, all dark and gleaming and... there had to be some other word besides 'sexy' to complete the description, but she couldn't think of it at the moment. "And why did it come equipped with an axe holder?"

Spike's eyes lit with that cool-new-toy look he usually reserved for especially impressive implements of destruction. He shoved the axe handle through the loops on the side of the bike and made sure the blade was secure. "As you said--beat up demon, take its stuff. The former owner made the mistake of trying to run me down with it a little bit before you got back." He swung himself onto the saddle and eased the weight of the motorcycle off its kickstand. "Helmet, pet."

"You're not wearing a helmet," Buffy grumbled, but she grabbed the one he tossed her and strapped it on. It was powder blue, had seen better days and didn't match the menacing jet black bike in the slightest. He'd probably scavenged it from the dump. Or stolen it from a much girlier demon than the one who'd owned the bike. She slipped in behind him on the seat. Ooh, leather. Comfy.

"I can survive twenty-story falls on my head, too." He gunned the engine and the bike roared to life. "Where're we off to tonight?"

"East Sunnydale Memorial." It was a small cemetery on the outskirts of town, and they hadn't been there in awhile. It wasn't all that popular amongst Sunnydale's vampire population, but Buffy felt that it was worthwhile to drop through every now and then and make sure it didn't get popular. She frowned. "He tried to run you down?" That didn't sit well. She was the only one allowed to beat up Spike, damn it, even if she had been dead at the time.

"Operative word is tried." He flashed that who-am-I-kidding-I-love-to-brag grin over his shoulder. "Shortly thereafter he and the bike parted ways and he didn't seem interested in it any more, so yours truly took it off his hands--what was left of 'em."

Buffy laid her cheek against his leather-clad back and wrapped her arms round his waist as Spike let out the brakes. They tore off down Revello Drive. The bike picked up speed, parting the night before them like a knife. Wind whipped over and around her, threatening to tug her hair free of her helmet, and her body vibrated in time with the throb of the engine. Between the howl of the wind and the engine noise it was impossible to talk, so she just gave herself up to enjoying the ride.

Dawn had a sentimental fondness for Spike's old DeSoto, but as far as Buffy was concerned, the DeSoto had been yuck on wheels, and if Spike never drove the thing again she'd shed no tears. Riding around in that huge antique boat of a car with its blacked-out windows and all-pervading smell of old cigarettes and spilled bourbon had possessed a certain edge, but nothing like this. This was wild and exhilarating. Spike was a really good rider, not that she had any plans to feed his ego further by telling him so. It felt good leaning into him as they rounded a corner and roared up the on ramp, her body pressed tightly to his. No heart beat beneath her ear, but it was hard to imagine anything feeling more vibrantly alive than the unliving body in her arms. The flat hard muscles of his stomach tensed under her hands as he shifted his weight from side to side, effortlessly weaving from lane to lane and occasionally white-lining it through heavier traffic. There was something utterly satisfying about speeding down the road with a sleek, powerful, savage beast purring between her thighs, wholly at her command...

_ And the motorcycle's pretty nice, too_.

As quickly as the thought bubbled up out of her subconscious her conscious grabbed it, clubbed it over the head, and stuffed it back where it belonged. There had been so many times in the last month when she'd wanted nothing more than to curl up in someone's arms--anyone's--and be held, wallow in the ancient, primal comfort of touch. She just wasn't on hugging terms with anyone at the moment. It was a little too weird with Willow or Tara, and Anya would get jealous with Xander, and Dawn was fifteen and prolonged physical contact with close relatives was hopelessly uncool and Giles would get all embarrassed and Spike... well, it would have been the height of unfairness to ask anything of the kind of him, knowing how he felt about her.

But it was OK to hold on to your undead-soulless-ex-mortal-enemy-talking-buddy when you happened to be riding behind him on a motorcycle.

Buffy _really_ liked the motorcycle.

Spike's sharp intake of breath jolted her out of her reverie in an instant. "Holy bleeding fuck!" The man had staggered out onto the highway not thirty feet in front of them. Drunk, or sick, or heaven knew what, he was wandering around in little circles in the middle of the right-most lane, making swoopy gestures with both arms at oncoming traffic. In a few seconds he was going to be worm food.

Spike swerved, avoiding the man by a hair's-breadth. Buffy yanked on his shoulder and pointed back; he gave her a "You're crazy!" look and hauled on the handlebars without hesitation, slewing into a turn which would have sent anyone without supernatural strength and reflexes skidding into oblivion. He circled back, riding the lane divider into oncoming traffic. Buffy was crouched on the back of the seat now, one hand on his shoulder and the other on the back end of the bike. As they barreled past the dazed-looking man in the road, she leaped, kicking off of the bike and soaring through the air. She hit the man head on, hoping for momentum to carry them both out of the road, but instead of rolling, he collapsed to his knees on the grease-stained concrete, carrying her with him.

Buffy scrambled to her feet. Headlights the size of Ghora eggs were blazing towards her and she heard the squeal of air brakes and the frantic blare of a horn. She bent down, lifted the man up bodily, and flung him back to the side of the road and safety. The words _I'm going to die. Again._ crystalized in her brain. The thought was curiously uninvolving. A heartbeat later the motorcycle roared up behind her and Spike grabbed her around the waist, yanking her off her feet. They made it onto the shoulder two breaths before the semi thundered past.

Spike held on to her, shaking like a leaf and muttering "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..." as devoutly as any prayer she'd ever heard.

OK. No death today. "Spike," she said, a bit strangled. "Let go. 'Cause inhaling, you know? Important."

He blinked, then released his death-grip a little. "Oh. Sorry, love."

Rubbing her bruised ribs, Buffy detached herself from the vampire's side and walked shakily over to the object of their rescue. He sat there, sprawled anyhow, blinking dazedly up at her, a thin, weak-chinned man with receding hair and a long nose. His face was strangely familiar, but it took Buffy a minute to place it. She hadn't seen him in long time. "Willy?" she asked, disbelieving. "Willy the Snitch?"

Willy giggled inanely and pawed at the air in the direction of the oncoming headlights. "Pretty shiny fishy," he said. "Slishy fishy." He squinted, faint recognition sparking in his watery eyes. "Slayer? Don't break the fishy, pleeeease..."

Spike got off the bike and walked over, rubbing the back of his neck and looking perplexed. "Bloody hell, what's happened to him?"

"I don't know. I don't think I threw him that hard." She poked gingerly at Willy's lank disordered hair. "I don't see any injuries..."

The vampire sniffed. "No blood. Or not enough for me to smell it over the diesel fumes, anyway."

"We need to get him off of the highway." Buffy glanced around. All right, the DeSoto did have its good points after all. "Can all three of us fit on the bike?"

"Sure, love. If we're completely insane." At her look he sighed. "Maybe we could tie him to the handlebars or something." He dropped to a crouch and waved a hand in front of the bartender's eyes. "Oi, Willy, about that tenner..."

Willy's rat-like face broke into a sweet, foolish smile. "Wheee! Talk to the hand!"

Spike sucked in his cheeks and rocked back on his heels. "The old skinflint really is gone if he doesn't remember..." He stopped, an evil smile slowly illuminating his angular features. "Of course we've got to help the poor bloke," he said piously, getting to his feet. "Only decent thing for hero-types to do, innit? Come on then, Slayer! Give us a hand." He hauled Willy to his feet and led the scrawny man towards the bike.

Buffy gave him another look. "Spike, what are you up to?"

"You have a nasty suspicious mind, Slayer."

"Someone gives me lots of practice." Buffy patted Willy down and pulled a shabby brown leatherette wallet out of the appropriate pocket. She began going through it. "Huh. There's still a good hundred dollars in here, and credit cards--" She smacked Spike's hand away without looking up and he pouted. "--so if he was mugged it wasn't by a very efficient thief." She pulled out a California driver's license and peered at the small print in the chancy light of the freeway floodlights. "4520 West Endicott, Apartment 23D. That must be where he lives." She stuffed the card back into the wallet and folded it up. "I guess we could take him there," she said doubtfully. "I'd say hospital, but the way he's acting, it's like..."

"Yeh." Spike took her meaning immediately. "Like Tara was when Glory got to her." His dark brows dipped together for a moment as if he were trying to remember something, and he shook his head slightly, as if that could dislodge the thought he wanted. "But Glory's dead."

Buffy shivered. "Yeah. Really quite sincerely dead. Show of hands for everyone in this conversation who's also been dead?" Spike grimaced, conceding the point. Her mouth firmed. "Well, he's got to go somewhere, and I'm not feeling Mother Theresa enough for it to be my place." She opened up the wallet again, looking for someone to contact in cases of emergency, but there was nothing. Not surprising; in the circles Willy moved in, you were healthy or you were dead, with very little middle ground. "If he's like Tara, someone will have to feed him and stuff, and I'm sorry, but eww, Willy."

She could have sworn there was a twinkle in Spike's eyes, but maybe it was the floodlights. "Keep in mind that if you take him back to his place--assuming the address on the license is current--you'll still have to take care of any feeding yourself, as yours truly won't be able to walk in the door."

Buffy gave him the evil eye. "Willy," she cooed, "Can Spike come inside your apartment?"

Willy goggled up at her. "Spikey in the morning...?"

"The invite's got to be done at the door in question anyway, pet," Spike said with considerable amusement.

She smiled sweetly. "I'm sure I can talk him around by the time we get there."

****

Getting Willy off the highway ultimately entailed hog-tying him with his own suspenders and balancing him between them, draped across Buffy's lap like a trophy deer. Buffy found this considerably less enjoyable than the previous arrangement, and Spike didn't seem any too happy about the situation either. They took the next exit and followed surface streets to Willy's place at a speed which, for Spike, approached sedate.

The apartment complex was old and grungy. Several flavors of loud music battled for dominance in the night air and no one seemed inclined to pay attention to two people lugging a body across the parking lot. Willy's apartment was a one-bedroom roach trap on the bottom floor which looked as if he'd offered to store all his neighbors' spare grunge. After finally discovering the keys in another pocket (Buffy made Spike search this time, because eww, Willy) Buffy dragged Willy inside and dumped him unceremoniously on the couch. Five minutes of coaching on her part finally induced Willy to say something which satisfied whatever supernatural laws prevented uninvited vampires from entering private dwellings and allowed Spike to follow them in.

"Well," Spike said, surveying the room with hands on hips. "Couch, telly, two-foot stack of Hustlers, and windows covered with tin foil. I feel right at home. Wonder if he's got any blood in the fridge. I always suspected he was holding out with the good stuff." He began rummaging through the mess of dirty magazines, old newspapers, and empty beer cans on the table while Buffy untied their oblivious host. He came up with a somewhat gnawed-upon ballpoint pen and a pad of yellow legal paper and began scribbling away, squinting slightly at his work.

Willy sat on the couch and looked around vaguely. Buffy looked at him, at a loss for what to do now. "I guess we should call Willow. Maybe she and Tara can do something for him."

"Best bet," Spike agreed. He handed Willy the pen and shoved the legal pad in front of him. "Sign here, there's a good Willy."

"Round and round, all the fishies," Willy said, making a wild whorl with the pen. Spike guided his hand back to the bottom of the paper.

"Just write your name, nice big legible letters..." He took the pad back, ripped off the page, folded it up and tucked it into his inside coat pocket.

Buffy looked up from the phone where she was dialing her own house. "Spike, what...?"

He looked as innocent as it was possible for a vampire to look, which was not very. "Private business matter, pet. I'm not diddling him out of the family farm or anything, just taking care of a few loose ends."

She gave him a good long look. She seemed to be doing a lot of that tonight. "I trust you, Spike."

God, it was incredible when his eyes softened like that. "It's nothing you'd want to stake me for, love, I promise. Here." He pulled the paper back out. Buffy took it trepidatiously and began deciphering Spike's surprisingly lovely but old-fashioned handwriting.

"'In consideration for services rendered to me by William the Bloody a.k.a. Spike this night of November 28th, 2001, I hereby cancel any outstanding debts owed by the aforementioned William the Bloody to the Alibi Room or to...' You're trying to get rid of your _bar tab_? She bit back a laugh and returned the paper to him. "Um. I can't exactly say I approve, but no, I don't want to stake you for it. Besides, I don't think he's gonna consider that binding when he comes to. I don't think Willy knows what 'aforementioned' means."

Spike, who'd been watching her reaction with surprising anxiousness, relaxed. "Probably not, but a bloke's got to try." As she waited for Willow to pick up the phone, he looked at the sheet of paper thoughtfully, lower lip caught in his teeth. After awhile he heaved a rueful sigh and tore it into four neat pieces. "It's the little things, you know," he said, examining the scuff marks on the toes of his boots intently. "Where I get lost. I mean killing people and eating them, it's bloody obvious that's not... but all this other rubbish you have to do to be good..."

"Spike..."

He glanced up, still worrying at his lower lip. "I know, love, I can't be. Not really. But still... I don't want you to be ashamed of knowing me."

_He has got to be the weirdest vampire on the planet. But it's a sweet kind of weird, sometimes..._ She coiled the phone cord around her hand as the answering machine kicked in, and waited impatiently for it to get through its spiel. "Spike, I've hated you, despised you, been a little--very little, and it was a long time ago, so don't get a swelled head--scared of you once or twice, wanted to kill you more times than I can count--but I can honestly say I've never been ashamed to know you."

He cocked his head to one side and smiled--not his usual cocky grin or self-satisfied smirk, just a pleased smile. The corners of his eyes crinkled up in the nicest way when he did that... "Ah. Well, that's--that's good to know."

Was the fact that he could take something like that as a compliment more on the weird side or the sweet side? The tension in the phone cord brought her up short. Somehow or other she'd taken several steps closer to him. Spike was looking down at her with his hands buried in his duster pockets as if he didn't trust them out in the open. Funny how she always thought of Spike as being tall, when he wasn't, really, well, taller than her of course, most people were, but--

A nasal drawl behind them said, "Aww, isn't that sweet?"

Spike whipped round, his eyes going yellow, and Buffy almost dropped the phone. She could hear the beep as someone hit the button to turn the recorded message off and Willow's tinny voice from the receiver saying "Hello? Summers residence. Hello?"

"Uh, never mind, Will, it's under control," Buffy said, slamming the phone back into its cradle.

Willy the Snitch was sitting on his couch, rubbing his temples with both hands and glaring impartially at the two of them. "I have the Slayer and her pet vampire making googly eyes in my living room. I get it. I'm in hell." He cowered reflexively at Spike's growl, then straightened up and poked a belligerent index finger in the vampire's direction. "I'm not scared of you, Spike! That chip in your head'll put you flat on your back if you so much as lift a finger against me, so just get out before I throw you out! And don't think about comin' back later 'cause I'm having someone do the spell to uninvite you so fast that--"

Despite Willy's bravado there was a panicky note in his voice and Spike didn't look particularly intimidated; he might not be able to hurt Willy, but it was unlikely that Willy could do much to hurt him, at least not without a lot of help. Buffy walked over to the couch, flicked her hair over her shoulder, put her hand in the center of Willy's chest, and shoved. He sat back very suddenly. "Hey!" he whined, rubbing his sternum.

"One of us can still hit people, Willy, so if I were you? No more googly eye remarks, especially about people who've just taken an hour out of their busy schedule to keep you from becoming a pancake on the 405." She bent over to look him in the eye. "Don't take this personally, but why are you rational?"

"Why am--" All of a sudden memory of the last several hours hit, and Willy hunched his shoulders and shrank in upon himself, trying to sink into the ancient stained fabric of the couch. "I--I dunno."

"Can you remember what happened to you?"

Willy pinched the bridge of his nose in concentration. "I was in the office--at the bar, y'know? I hear this noise out back and went to see, we get bums goin' through the garbage all the time lookin' for empties that ain't empty, if ya know what I mean. There was this guy out in the alley..." He trailed off and rubbed his mouth. "Didn't look exactly like a bum, though. Too clean. Middle-aged guy, pretty good shape, dark hair, a little grey maybe..." He shook his head, baffled. "Wasn't a vampire or nothin', I can tell 'em near as good as you can, Slayer. Just a guy. I ask him what he's doin' out there, he says just passing through, and I say fine, and he says--then it all gets confused." He looked around. "Shit! If the back door was left open those assholes will clear me out! I gotta get--" He got unsteadily to his feet and lurched across the room to the front door before a dizzy spell hit. He grabbed the doorknob and leaned heavily on the grimy doorpost before sliding to his knees.

Just a guy. Ben had been just a guy. Ben was dead. Which was why Glory was dead, which was... damn. "We'll make sure the back door's locked. We've got to make a stop there anyway."

Willy pulled himself to his feet. "Well, in that case, ain't you gonna offer me a ride?"

Spike smiled--definitely of the evil. "I think we can arrange that."

******

The faded letters on the front of the building said 'The Alibi Room', but no one ever called it anything but Willy's. Willy's bar greatly resembled its owner--small, shabby, and furtive, it crouched between two larger buildings as if trying to escape notice. As soon as the motorcycle rolled to a stop in the parking lot said owner unfolded himself from his awkward perch and lit out for the front door, a look of absolute terror in his watery eyes.

Buffy watched him go. "Did you absolutely have to make him ride on the handlebars?"

Spike paused, lighter halfway to cigarette, and thought about it for a moment. "Yeh."

"Just checking." She reluctantly let her arms fall from his waist and got off the bike, checking out the parking lot warily. "Is it safe for you to be here? Last I heard you weren't very popular in Demonsville."

Spike took a drag on his cigarette and snorted smoke. "I've got a big strong Slayer to protect me, haven't I? 'Course it's not safe, that's half the fun."

"This 'fun' you speak of, it's one of those English words that translates to 'nerve-wracking terror' in American?"

Spike growled and lunged for her; Buffy dodged, laughing, then stopped so abruptly that he nearly ran into her. "'Smatter, love, losing your touch?" he asked teasingly.

Laughing. She'd been laughing. For a moment there, she'd felt...good. Really good. Alive, and happy to be so. Astounded, she tried to grasp the sensation, analyze it, clutch it to her heart--and of course it dissolved under her scrutiny, fraying away into bewilderment. She avoided his eyes. "No, no, this is just--we can't be playing around. Business, now, here."

She could feel that blue gaze burning into the top of her head, heard a faint sigh. "You're in charge, Slayer."

Willy was already there when they arrived in the alley behind the bar, scouting suspiciously around the loading dock to see what had been stolen in his absence. Buffy examined the alley in minute detail, determined to do or say nothing which could remotely be described as googly. There were empty crates and a big cube of crushed cardboard boxes on the loading dock, and a dumpster full of assorted bar trash down in the alley proper, resumably what the mystery guy had been going through when Willy discovered him. A smaller container stamped 'SUNNYDALE RECYCLES' stood nearby, half-full of empty beer cans and broken bottles. She wasn't sure what she'd expected to find, but if anything useful was here, it wasn't in a form she could recognize.

Spike paced around looking at things in a less organized fashion, the faint frown back on his face, nostrils flaring every now and then as he tried to pick up a scent. He'd put his cigarette out, which meant he was really serious about it.

"I give up," Buffy said at last. "If there are clues here, I'm missing 'em. Unless... Spike, is that clue-face?"

He came to a halt in the middle of the alley, took his half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and re-lit it. He ran one hand through his hair, ruffling the pale waves further. "This is 'What have I sodding forgotten?' face. There's something... familiar here, but I can't suss it out." He jerked his chin at the bar. "Ought to see if anyone inside knows who this bloke is. 'Sides, I'm famished."

Buffy didn't think that it was very likely that any of the patrons would recognize Willy's vague description if Willy himself, who knew everything worth knowing about Sunnydale's less than savory inhabitants, didn't know who the guy had been. But... it was closing in on eleven, and maybe a break would clear her head. "OK. Let's go."

The dim lights inside Willy's did little to conceal the accumulated grime. The flyspecked mirror behind the bar failed to reflect a good third of the patrons, and probably wished it couldn't reflect another third. The crowd wasn't a large one, but from the moment they crossed the threshold every eye in the bar that wasn't on her was on Spike, half a dozen sullen gazes pinned to the center of their backs, evenly divided between preparations for fight or flight. Normally when Buffy dropped by Willy's, broken furniture and smashed glass resulted.

Spike, having undergone an instant transformation into Big Bad mode the moment he'd crossed the threshold, was eating it up. He strutted over to the bar, platinum blond head held high, all cocky swagger and knowing smirk. Enjoying himself, and the knowledge that one wrong word, one wrong move on his part would precipitate a brawl. He leaned one elbow on the bar top and flashed the natural-born-killer grin at the female Bracken demon behind the bar.

"O-neg with a Guinness chaser and a club soda for the lady."

The bartender looked uncertain. "Um...there's...you..."

"Cash on the barrelhead or get out, Spike," Willy snapped, bustling up behind her.

Spike raised an eyebrow at Buffy. "There, you see? No good deed goes unpunished." He turned back to Willy, obviously ready to argue the point. Buffy put a hand on his shoulder.

"Charge it to the Magic Box, and give us a receipt," she said firmly. "We're on the job, it's a slaying business expense," she added at Spike's inquisitive look. "Anya'll charge it back to the Council of Watchers, or deduct it from the shop's taxes, or something financially brilliant like that."

Spike looked as if he weren't sure whether to be pleased at getting free drinks or annoyed at being cheated out of a skirmish, but finally settled on pleased. He smirked at the bar girl, or demon. "In that case, give us some nachos too."

Buffy started to object, then shrugged. It couldn't hurt. After all, this was strictly business.


	3. Chapter 3

Buffy took her club soda and left the bar to find a table while Spike collected the rest of his order. Over in the corner, someone put a quarter in the ancient jukebox and it started wheezing out "What's Love Got To Do With It?" _Story of my life_, Buffy thought, watching Spike stroll back towards their table, balancing his beer, a plastic baggie of blood, a glass and a plate of nachos piled high with things which were mercifully unidentifiable beneath a thick layer of orange cheese-like substance. _ And who says supernatural agility is only good for slaying?_

A Zagros demon left its booth and shuffled past him on its way to the bar, brushing belligerently close to his shoulder. Spike twisted lithely to one side in time to avoid spilling his beer, and rounded upon the demon, his eyes flaring from blue to feral yellow. Zagros and vampire growled at one another for a moment, and then, with a resentful glance over at Buffy, the Zagros lowered its dorsal crest and shuffled off. Having the Slayer in the place did tend to put a bit of a damper on the hijinks.

Spike slid into the chair across from her and plunked his food down on the graffiti-scarred tabletop, obscuring 'Lanark the Gouger Loves Mindy, 1977'. Buffy looked pointedly over at the Zagros' demon's table. "If you think I'm going to save your bacon if you antagonize everyone here into beating you up in the alley, you've got another think coming."

He grinned, wholly unrepentant. "If I antagonize everyone into beating me up in the alley, the last thing I want is your help. Got a bloody reputation to maintain." Suiting action to word, he ripped a corner off the plastic baggie of blood with his teeth, poured it into his glass, and gulped down a hefty swallow. He crumpled up the baggie in the ashtray and sat back with a satisfied sigh. Angel had never liked feeding in front of her, even when it was pig's blood sipped from a coffee mug. Spike would happily scarf down human blood to her face and make yummy noises. There was a lesson in that. _I wish I knew what it was._

Spike shoved the nachos into the center of the table. "Here you go. Not as good as you get at the Bronze, but you get enough of that cheese stuff on it--"

Buffy poked at the gluey pile with a forefinger. "Not hungry."

His eyes did that softening thing again, real concern in the blue depths. "Come on, love, you need to keep your strength up. I eat more than you do, and I only do it for amusement."

God, did he have to do that, slip from snarky to sweet and back again in the space of two breaths? It kept her off balance, and the last thing she needed was to be off balance around Spike. _Go with the snark. The snark is your friend._ "It might help if you offered me something containing shreds of actual nutrition." She poked the nachos again suspiciously. "What goes into those things?"

"Excess poker chips, most like," Spike replied, callously stuffing a handful of chips, cheese and mystery meat into his mouth. "Live dangerously."

Buffy glared across the table at him, trying to suppress a smile. Her ire failed to make much impression; the vampire took another swallow of blood, followed by a swig of Guinness, and settled back in his chair with an expression of perfect content. Well, of course. Spike _enjoyed_ hanging out in grungy bars, especially when he could run up an exorbitant tab and charge it to the Watcher's Council as a business expense. This was probably his idea of heaven. She picked up a chip and nibbled on it. Not bad, for a hideous concoction of cholesterol-dripping goo. "All right, I give in. A plate of chips, a glass of seltzer, and thou, beside me bitching in Willy's..."

He chuckled. "And Willy's is paradise enow."

It took a second.

"You finished that," Buffy said accusingly.

Spike's angular face suffused with guilty alarm, as if she'd caught him out at something. "You started it." After a moment he added cautiously, "Didn't know you went in for that sort of thing."

They regarded one another warily, a pair of fencers each expecting a jab in a vulnerable spot. Buffy picked up another chip and ate it without thinking about what might be hiding under the cheese sauce. "I just happened to remember it from the half of my intro poetry class I managed to get through last year. It was very... seize the day. Which used to be my motto, though now it's more like 'Seize the day very carefully since it's probably covered with sharp pointy things.'"

"Always liked old Omar myself." Honestly, Spike sounded as if he were confessing to a sordid addiction. He looked round to make sure no one else was within listening distance. "Which edition did they give you? Fourth?"

"Editions? Um..."

He sat forward, gesturing with his beer bottle as he warmed to the subject. "Yeh, the Rubaiyat was like 'Leaves of Grass', Fitzgerald revised the whole thing top to toe three or four times, so it was really a work in progress as long as the bloke was alive--" At her astonished expression he cut himself off, clearly embarrassed despite his inability to blush, raking his fingers through his hair nervously. "Anyway, there's a bloody sight more than a few verses. Don't need to bore you with the details."

"No! I mean, not bored. I didn't know there was more. There were just a few verses in the textbook and we hadn't gotten to that chapter by the time I had to drop out of college." As he didn't seem too inclined to snicker at the idea of her struggling through a poetry class, she added a little wistfully, "I wish I could have read more of it."

"There are such things as libraries, Slayer," Spike rejoined with his customary sarcasm, "And I've heard they'll let just anyone in here in the colonies. But..." He ducked his head and muttered, "gotacopyyoucouldborrowifyouwant."

Buffy blinked a few times, realized she wasn't saying anything, and managed, "Sure. I'd like--" _I'm sitting in Willy's and talking about poetry with Spike. There is something deeply weird with this picture_. "--that. Do you ice skate?"

Spike looked askance at the change of subject, but went with it. "Not since I was twelve. I fell through the ice and caught pneumonia. Nearly died--worse, got stuck in bed the whole of Christmas holidays and half-way into next term. My mum had a fit. Put me off skating. Why?"

This time it was her turn to grin at him. "Just wanted to make sure I hadn't fallen into a parallel universe where we had things in common. Ten more minutes and that's it," she said firmly. She reached for another nacho and discovered to her surprise that there were only a few broken bits left. "Then we get back to hunting for Willy's mystery guy. Maybe the other bartender knows him."

Spike gazed speculatively over at the bar. "Could chat her up a bit. I think she likes me."

"Yeah, I can feel the love from here. I've got to hit the bathroom. Just try to keep the Big Bad posing down to a minimum, huh?"

Spike laughed. "Posing? Who's posing?"

****

Tanner sat at the end of the bar and nursed the beer that an hour of genteel panhandling ("I just need to use the phone, my car's...") had bought him. There was a dollar and some change lying on the bar two seats down, but he didn't make a move towards it. He prided himself on not being a thief. Except, of course, for necessary things.

The bartender's soul had tasted of old clothes and the mouse-nibblings of fear. The astringent flavor lingered in the back of his throat. Not the good stuff. Wouldn't have lasted him a day even if he'd taken it all. Tanner was selective, when he could afford to be. Had to be, with the others depending on him. He'd taken only what he needed from the bar owner for tonight. The bar owner--he'd heard someone call him Willy--bustled by, swiping a glass with a dirty rag, his close-set beady eyes passing over Tanner without a flicker of recognition. He was relieved to see the thin, nervy man had come back--he'd intended to shove him back inside the bar once he'd taken what was necessary, but Willy'd taken fright and run away.

"He will not know you," the guy with no eyes proclaimed. The guy with no eyes was not much on merely saying things.

"I know. I've done this before." Tanner shifted restlessly on his seat. Even without magic involved he knew how to escape notice. He had one of those faces, a little lined, a little tired, a lot ordinary. Combine that with the shapeless off-the-rack jacket and slacks and defeated slouch and he could have been any of a thousand men in a hundred bars.

The eyeless man, on the other hand, was just plain invisible, which was a little more bothersome with Willy's stolen rationality holding his thoughts together. Fortunately there was nothing unusual about someone sitting in a bar and mumbling to himself. Tanner sipped his drink and stared at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There was grey in his hair. When had he gotten that old? This was the reason he put off hunting sometimes--it was more comfortable when you couldn't remember how much you'd lost.

The blond man from the pool house was sitting at one of the tables across the room with a young woman, small and pretty if rather too thin. If he wanted to he could watch her in the mirror, talking animatedly to empty air. Right. Vampire. If he wanted to see the man too he'd have to turn around and watch them directly. Since everyone else in the bar was doing the same thing it probably wouldn't hurt. The woman looked familiar. A memory of her swinging a hammer almost as big as she was flashed across his mind's eye. She was someone important... the Slayer. Yeah. She'd been there too, when the walls of the worlds had dissolved. Now the two of them sat here, talking, laughing, as absorbed in one another as any couple he'd ever seen at the Bronze. Normal. Well, except for him being a vampire and her being able to swing magic hammers like they weighed nothing. Mostly normal. If he'd had the energy to spare he could have hated them for that.

"So what is it exactly you want me to do?" Tanner asked. "I was never much of a wizard, even before..."

The eyeless man was silent for a moment "The Slayer has... encountered us before. She will be wary of our usual methods. You must prepare our way in her heart and in the hearts of her friends."

"And how do I do that?"

"You have a skill," the eyeless man whispered. "Use it. Observe them. All evil is born of fear. Find their fears, find the one whose fears rule them. Find her fear. We will do the rest."

"I do this, and you restore the others?"

"They will all be made whole. I swear upon the Seal of Akhun."

"And none of us will owe you anything further?"

The eyeless man's lips sketched a sere, horrible smile on his parchment face. The was a note of pity, or perhaps amusement, in his voice when he spoke again. "You own nothing else worth our taking. Your souls are as your lives: dry leaves upon the wind. You made no difference to the balance when you were alive. You will make no difference to the balance when you are dead."

"You are lying," Tanner said, setting his glass down. "I'm insane, not stupid. Remember that." The eyeless man was right about one thing--the balance had been out of whack ever since last May, stresses building up like pressure along an earthquake fault. When you'd lived on a Hellmouth for most of your life you got good at noticing the signs. Which way it was out of balance... well, that was more difficult to say. "I'll do what you ask because it may help the others, and I see no other way of doing that. I won't be surprised if we all end up dead, or worse. But you know what?" He stared at the wrinkled, empty sockets, each sewn shut with a double X of coarse twine. "That might be an improvement."

****

Buffy sidled down the cramped, ill-lit hallway to the bathrooms. "Sorry," she said to the man who brushed past her on his way out, then "Hey! Watch the hair!" Her good mood dissipated. They were wasting their time here; for all she knew, that hair-stroking perv had just been their target.

Things with far too many legs scuttled out of the way when the lights flipped on. Buffy surveyed the tiny room with distaste; she was fairly certain that some of the things on the floor were developing their own ecologies. She stared at the toilet for several minutes before deciding that she could wait for something a little less Third World. She bent over the sink and turned on the cold water tap, letting it flow for awhile to get the rust stains out. Once the water was running reasonably clear, she splashed a little on her face.

Her own reflection stared back at her from the grimy mirror over the sink. Big haunted hazel eyes, a waifishly thin face framed in long hair slowly reverting to its natural brown--she hadn't bothered to lighten it since her... return. Mouth a little too wide, nose with that funny bump to it that never seemed to bother anyone else but which drove her to distraction. Reassuring. Reflections meant Not-Vampire Buffy. Something that had been a real fear at one point--it hadn't been much, but she had tasted vampire blood that once. But she hadn't risen in the night, hadn't clawed her way with desperate strength through a layer of hardwood and six feet of earth, hadn't come back from the dead. Not in the few nights after her death.

No, it had taken a few months.

_Willow meant well. Willow always means well._

She couldn't remember what it had been like to be dead. All she remembered was the moment just before, when for the first time in years she'd been completely at peace. All of them had meant well, Willow and Spike and Dawn in trying to bring her back, Giles and Tara and Xander in trying to prevent it. They'd all been doing what they thought was right... mostly, anyway. The whys of it didn't matter now anyway. She was alive again, and had to... live with it. So she got up dutifully each morning and went through the motions, trying to be grateful. Every now and then, just for a minute or two, the world would click into focus around her and she'd be alive, not just existing. The wonder of those moments was enough to keep her going, hoping for the next one, fearing it wouldn't come.

_I used to feel like that all the time._

Tonight had been good. Strange, but enjoyable. That summed up a lot of her interaction with Spike lately. It wasn't that she didn't like hanging with the others, but it could be a strain. They desperately wanted her to be all right, and she felt guilty when she couldn't be. Spike didn't expect her to be all right. It was very relaxing.

There were a couple of demons of indeterminate species lounging outside the end of the hallway as she left the bathroom, and Buffy slowed as she approached them, composing herself. She could see Spike over at the bar again, buttering up the bartender and ordering what looked like several bottles of whiskey before his free drink ticket ran out. OK, that was wrong. _Bad Spike, no biscuit._ She couldn't get too upset about it; after the way the Council'd jerked them all around, paying for Spike's liquor was the least they could do. The vampire gave the Bracken woman behind the bar a rakish grin, and Buffy had to admit that a little part of her thought that having brash, cocky Spike back at least part time was...fun.

The Bracken nodded in response to whatever Spike had said, bent over and rummaged around below the level of the bar, and came up a moment later with several small plastic baggies filled with red fluid. Spike collected his booty, alcoholic and otherwise, and sauntered back to their table to stow it away in various pockets in his duster.

_ Fun?_ the responsible world-saving part of her mind piped up. _Excuse me, but when did Spike stockpiling human blood become 'fun'?_

The blood Willy served to his undead clientele was kosher; she'd checked into that long ago--obtained from human patrons who donated in exchange for liquor, or 'liberated' from the hospital. No one had died for it. But still... Buffy examined her own reactions of the evening uneasily. She knew Spike still preferred human blood to pig when he could get it; he made no secret of the fact. But... shouldn't she be more wiggy over it? Drinking human blood was wrong, and... and vampire-y, no matter how he got it... wasn't it? He'd told her this very night that he still had trouble fighting his basic urge towards the bad. Was she just making it more difficult for him to stay on the straight and narrow in the long run by tolerating these minor slips? And how minor a slip was this, anyway? Was the fact that Spike was the only person she felt really comfortable with these days making her cut him slack she shouldn't be cutting?

"...putting on airs," one of the demons at the end of the hall said as she approached. It was tall and thin and bile-colored. "Thinks because he's here with the Slayer no one's gonna lay a hand on his traitorous ass? I say we get Durgo and the boys from the clan and have a little talk with him later. He's obviously forgotten the last one."

The other one, short, scaly and possessed of at least one more arm than it really needed, chuckled nastily. "You know Spike. He never struts higher but when some bitch has him on a short leash," Short-n'-Scaly said. Its voice was deep and gravelly, like a laryngitic bullfrog. "And you can't get much bitchier than the Slayer."

"Oh, really?" Buffy said brightly. "You must move in really limited circles."

****

Spike slouched comfortably down in his chair, sipping his beer and keeping an unobtrusive eye on the rest of the patrons. So far he was having a ripping night. He'd gotten in a good fight with a couple of kills right off, he'd given that git Willy a proper scare, he'd gotten Buffy to smile a couple of times, he'd just taken care of half his shopping for the month on the Council's shilling, and he'd made the astonishing discovery that the Slayer had not only read one of his favorite poems, but had liked it. And hadn't immediately skewered him for his admission that _he'd_ liked it.

_Bet she'd like Robert Service. And Kipling. And--bloody hell, rein yourself in, William! She took half of one poetry class and said she liked one poem in it. Don't be more of an over-eager ponce than you can help_ .

"...get Spike when they leave..."

Spike set his Guinness down and unslouched himself. His vampiric hearing was perfectly capable of picking up a whispered conversation on the opposite end of a large and moderately noisy room. Like anyone else, he didn't listen to most of what he heard--heartbeats and mice crawling behind the walls and boring bar conversations--but there were a few sounds to which he was always attentive: certain dangerous tones of voice, for example, or his own name... He concentrated on picking out that voice from the desultory chatter and the music of the jukebox. There. The two demons over by the hall leading to the restrooms.

An anticipatory shiver ran through him, lifting the hairs on the backs of his arms. If they decided to try him alone, he could probably take both of them, or at least make it a difficult enough fight that they'd think twice about pressing it to its conclusion. If they went and got all the friends they were talking about, though... that could turn nasty. He had no expectation that Buffy'd back him up; she'd said as much, and she'd never gotten involved in his ongoing feud with the rest of Sunnydale's demons before. Spike looked around the bar thoughtfully. Besides the two by the bathroom hall and the Zagros demon, there were two vampires playing darts over in one corner and a scattering of humans and vampires on barstools and at various tables. No more than a dozen people all told; it was a slow night.

He had no qualms about turning tail and running from unfavorable odds when it was only his own hide on the line, but he hadn't been lying when he'd told Buffy he had a reputation to maintain. Sheer fighting prowess wasn't what kept the demon population of Sunnydale from ganging up and crushing him like a bug--he was good, but not that good. There were plenty of creatures in the demon world stronger and faster than a vampire only halfway through his second century. What kept him in one piece was the general belief that if you went up against William the Bloody, you had a good chance of dying, and William the Bloody didn't give a damn if he died in the process of killing you. That made enough of his potential opponents think twice about taking him on to ensure his continued sojourn in the land of the unliving.

He had the option of trying to leave, with or without Buffy, before Muff and Jeff over there decided to go collect their mates, but it would make a more lasting impression on the populace if he carried the fight to them before they could carry it to him. They couldn't very well go collect their mates with broken kneecaps, could they?

One of the other sounds he always paid attention to interrupted his deliberations. Buffy's voice. She'd come out of the hall and was frowning up at the taller of the two demons, who was making the obligatory threatening remarks. He had no worries of her being in real danger--if he could take those pillocks, she could wipe the floor with them--but she sounded angry, and it made a perfect excuse for him to stroll over and give them a piece of what for. Besides, buggered if he'd let her have all the fun. Spike tossed back the last of his blood, licked his lips and got up, drifting across the barroom floor as silently as smoke. With luck, he was going to get his skirmish after all.

Both demons were fully occupied with Buffy, and didn't notice him stalking up behind them. The short one was making nervous motions of attempted escape; the taller one looked disgusted at its companion's sudden reversal of attitude. "This isn't your ground, Slayer," it rasped out. "It would behoove you to exercise caution."

Buffy planted one fist on her hip, looking incredulous. "Or what, you'll practice your Word-A-Day on me? If so I suggest you get a new calendar, cause 'behoove'? Not scary." Her eyes met Spike's for an instant. "I'm only saying this once. Remember it. Spike's working with me these days, and the only one allowed to lay hands on his traitorous ass is me."

Her expression dared him to make anything of it, but Spike was too pleased and stunned at the unexpected backup to come up with anything beyond "Awfully flattering, Slayer." Both demons jerked round to face him as if pulled by one string. "Show's that way, boys," he said with as straight a face as he could manage.

Buffy shot the demons a disdainful look and tossed her hair over her shoulder. "Show's over. Come on, Spike. We've got places to go."

She brushed past him and headed for the door. He watched her retreating back (and other more interesting parts) for a second, then shrugged. "Sorry, boys," he said with a smirk at the taller demon. "Can't oblige you tonight, I've got a little strutting to take care of."

He caught up with Buffy as she passed their table, grabbed his duster off the back of his chair, and fell in step beside her. The Zagros demon he'd faced off with earlier looked up with a startled grunt, then rose and shuffled towards the door ahead of them. "They're signaling to the Zagros demon," he said conversationally. "Probably going to jump me once we get outside. If you're not inclined to participate while they beat me up in the alley, mind the motorbike for us, will you? I don't want it scratched."

Buffy gave him a distracted "Mmmf" of acknowledgment. Something was obviously biting her arse--she was still frowning, lower lip pushed out in that delightfully edible-looking pout... She took a deep breath and looked up at him with those big eyes, the irises gone grey with thought. "Spike..."

"Yeh, love?"

"Go put the blood back. We're not paying for your nummy people snacks."

That had not been on the list of things he'd expected to hear. Spike suppressed a growl of exasperation. "I think not, pet. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get hold of the good stuff these days? The Council can afford it. Think of it as keeping me on retainer."

She came to a full stop, folded her arms, and locked eyes with him--the serious, I've-been-thinking-hard-about-this look. Damn. "Look, Spike, I know there are certain things you can't help about the whole being a vampire biz. I don't expect you to take up sunbathing any time soon. But this isn't one of them. You do fine on pig's blood."

The prim, all for your own good tone made his hackles rise, but his unerring sense of what would brass Buffy off the most prevented him from exploding. Keep it all calm and logical. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and faced her down. "Fine? Yeh, and you do fine without chocolate, but I don't see you giving it up."

Her frown deepened and he could see her counting to ten. She started for the door again. "It's not the same thing, Spike! Chocolate's not sentient!"

"Neither are most of the people who donate blood to Willy's." He took a quick half-step ahead and grabbed the door for her. "How exactly is it not the same thing if I legally purchase a freely offered commodity? Illuminate me, Slayer! You against free enterprise? Bloody un-American of you."

Buffy stopped dead in the doorway, blocking his exit, her face set in the expression of mulish determination which always boded ill for whatever was opposing her. "We're not out of here till you take it back."

To hell with calm and logical. Go for the throat. That was what vampires did, and he was still a sodding vampire, despite Buffy's apparent conviction that he was a Pekingese. Well, and why shouldn't she be convinced when he'd done nothing since her return but trot after her with his tongue hanging out, hoping for a pat on the head? "I suppose we'll be spending the night, then. Why the sudden attack of squeamishness, Slayer? Getting along a little too well with the monster for comfort, are we?" He draped himself lazily against the doorframe, close enough to feel her body heat, and favored her with his nastiest smirk. Her grey-green eyes widened and her mouth made that little wounded twitch--bullseye. Not his imagination, then, that electricity in the air. He should have stopped there, but his demon temper couldn't resist a further dig. "Is the problem that you're bothered by my choice of liquid refreshment, or that you're not bothered?"

The mulish look blossomed into pure Buffy-fury, her face shining with that glorious inner light that made him want to grab her and ravish her right then and there, even as he battled an equally strong desire to shake her till her teeth rattled. When she spoke her voice was low and intense. "By the fact that you don't give a damn where your liquid refreshment comes from, Spike. I've seen some of the people Willy taps, remember? Run-down winos the blood bank wouldn't touch. They're dying by degrees, but a vampire's killing them all the same."

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, very poetic. I'm responsible for the welfare of every sot in town now, is it? Next you'll be on the second-hand smoke. How often do you put in time down at the soup kitchen, Slayer?"

"That has nothing to do with this!"

He pushed himself off the doorframe and they stood toe to toe, glaring at one another. He was breathing just as hard as she was and the air was heavy with the scent of anger and arousal. "Doesn't it, then? Tell you what, Slayer, you want to take these back--" He patted the blood bags in the pocket of his coat. "--you come get them."

Her lip quivered for a second. "Damn you, Spike, you can't fight me!"

She was poetry when she moved, when she danced, when she fought: free verse, a complex visual meter of deadly lines and curves. He would have given much (but not anything--no, he knew now that there were things even more important than the touch of her hand) to be able to dance with her again, in any sense of the word. He took a step closer, voice dropping to a low, sensual growl. "Who said anything about fighting?"

"We did," said a far less pleasant growl from outside. The anemic glow of the lone parking lot light shone down on the Zagros demon, who was flanked by Short-n-Scaly, Tall-n-Thin, and several more hulking indistinct shapes further back. They must have gone out the back way and circled round the building. The Zagros demon slapped a length of lead pipe against one horny palm.

Spike welcomed the painful-pleasurable stretch of bone and muscle as his demonic visage emerged. Yeah, he wanted blood tonight, and not in plastic baggies, either. Buffy's eyes narrowed and the corners of her usually generous mouth went tight as she turned to face them, an equally ominous sign for anyone who knew her. "Do you mind? This is a private conversation."

"We don't have any quarrel with you, Slayer," Tall-n-Thin rasped. "You're free to leave."

Buffy sighed. "I really hate it when I take the trouble to make elaborate threats and people just don't listen. I work hard on those, you know."

Spike glanced down at her and ran his tongue over his fangs. He carefully removed his duster and laid it down on the sidewalk, not about to take the chance of breaking two bottles of Jack Daniels in a free-for-all. "Just this once what say we skip the witty banter and go straight to the killing things part?"

Buffy's shoulders tensed and she rocked lithely on the balls of her feet, ready to pounce. "Good idea," she breathed. "Very good idea."

****

An hour later the bike came to a halt in the driveway and the engine rumbled to a halt. For a few seconds the two of them sat there, motionless, and then Buffy pulled away, wincing a little as she got off. Her right leg was still sore; she knew she was lucky it wasn't broken. She pulled off the powder-blue helmet and handed it to Spike, who took it without comment and hung it on its hook. He was moving pretty cautiously too; she hoped that the ribs were only cracked. Maybe, just maybe, taking on seven-to-two odds when unarmed had been a little bit foolhardy. At least they'd finally maneuvered the fight close enough to get Spike's axe off the motorcycle.

_Yeah, but you should see the other guys._

She reached out and brushed a thumb lightly across the raw scrape above his right eye. It had mostly stopped bleeding; lack of circulation had its advantages. "You gonna be OK?"

"Always am. You?"

"Nothing a hot bath and ten hours sleep won't fix." She searched his face. His eyes smouldered with bloodlust and tenderness, anger and love and longing--how could such a cold shade of blue burn so? "We're not finished with this, you know."

There was more than one meaning to that. Spike shrugged. "I know. So... same time tomorrow?"

She nodded. "I'm still mad at you."

He just looked at her. Reached up and removed her hand from his forehead, holding it in his own. In one swift stroke, dipped his head and licked his own blood from her thumb.

And looked up, and smiled. "Mutual."


	4. Chapter 4

Tara padded down the hall. Her bare feet made no sound on the carpet, and every so often she halted, listening for any slight movement behind the closed doors. The house was eerily silent. She had always been an early riser, and the habit stood her in good stead now--in all likelihood, her opponent was still snuggled obliviously beneath her covers--

WHAM! Dawn's door flew open. Dawn shot out into the hallway, blue cotton nightgown whipping round her thin calves, and skidded through the bathroom door in front of Tara. "Yeah!" she whooped, bare feet beating out a victory dance on the tiles. "I win, you lose, I rule, you suck!"

"Dawn, I've got an early class today!"

Dawn pulled the shower door open, looking at Tara over her shoulder and batting dark lashes over those great big innocent blue eyes. "But I got here first. Dibs. It's the law. Besides, you guys have Mom's bathroom. Eww..." She made a face at the bottom of the tub. "Buffy! You left gross Slayer scum all over the bathtub!"

"Scrub it out," came Buffy's muffled and unsympathetic reply.

Dawn stamped a foot. "It's your scum!"

"So?" A moment later a tousle-haired Buffy emerged from her own room, muffled in a robe and yawning. "You keep claiming I'm not the Mom of you. I concede. Not the Mom, therefore, not in charge of housework. If my scum offends you, give me the shower first."

"And let you leave me twice as much scum? Besides, I'm faster. You take about ten years to wash your hair."

"Never bring your sister back from the dead if you aren't willing to embrace her hair care rituals. Move!"

"You move!"

Scuffling ensued. Tara sighed and turned back to the master bedroom to see if Willow was through with the bathroom there. She wasn't at all sorry they'd decided to move into Buffy's house. Renting Joyce Summers' old room was cheaper than the dorm and gave Buffy a much-needed source of income, and it was quieter and more private than the dorm too. Usually. Behind her the sound of Dawn shrieking "Ahhh! No fair!" and Buffy caroling "I rule, you suck!" rang through the hall. There were times when she could work up nostalgia for student housing.

Still... it was good to see Buffy engaged with the rest of the world this morning. Her flashes of connection were getting more frequent, and lasting longer. Maybe things would work out. Maybe they'd all been cosmically lucky, and there really would be no more serious consequences from Willow's spell. Maybe... the bedroom was buzzing. Tara stopped just outside the doorway with her hand on the knob, puzzled. The vibration wasn't entirely physical, and it made her fingertips tingle. She tightened her grip on the knob and turned it, apprehension in the set of her shoulders.

Opening the door revealed the low, penetrating hum to be of very worldly origin. Willow sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, among the piles of schoolbooks and laundry and boxes they hadn't finished unpacking yet, wrapped up in a green silk robe. Her hair fanned across her shoulders like a fall of glowing embers in the morning light, and a huge old book bound in flaking brown calfskin lay open upon her lap, the pages bright with illuminated text in red and blue and gold. Her elfin face was set in concentration as she traced the words of a spell with one finger. The hum intensified as she did so.

"Willow?"

Her lover looked up, startled. The intricate patterns of power in the air shivered and dissolved, falling apart into nothing, and Willow's face fell with them. A wounded little "Oh!" escaped her lips. Willow closed the book and essayed a bright, painful smile. "Done with the shower."

Tara knelt and glanced briefly at the cover of the grimoire. _Thaumaturgie Made Plaine_. An old standard, full of cures for warts and spells for making chickens lay and love spells that didn't work. Easy, simple magics which shouldn't be any strain on Willow's recovering faculties. Nothing scary about this one, but Willow had promised her she'd wait before jumping back into magic. "Hon, I thought--weren't you going to wait on the spellcasting till I could monitor you? You could hurt yourself! Which spell were you doing?"

She didn't mean for her tone to be wary, or suspicious, or accusing. Maybe it wasn't any of those things; maybe it was only that the lingering tension between them had never quite dispelled since Willow had performed the Raising, or maybe it was part and parcel of her disappointment over the failed spell. Willow's brows slanted and her lips compressed to a thin angry line. "What, you didn't listen at the door long enough to tell?" She scrambled to her feet and skinned out of her robe, pulling clothes from the closet at random.

Tara winced. "I didn't mean--I was j-just wondering. I know you weren't really--" Most of the spells in that particular book required material components to cast; in speaking the words without them, Willow could only have been doing a dry run, a mental exercise. Not technically a violation of their agreement. And she'd messed it up at the first minor distraction, which made Tara all the more concerned that they stick to that agreement, but she could tell Willow wasn't in a mood to be reminded of that. Tara tugged on a strand of honey-colored hair, trying to come up with the right words. "It's just--are you sure you're ready?"

Willow grabbed a pair of jeans and began tugging them on. "Why doesn't--anyone--believe me? I'm fine! I've been fine for weeks! I've cast difficult spells before, and recovered just fine, and--and--" All of a sudden her face crumpled and a panicked sob escaped her. "It shouldn't be this hard!"

It only took a moment to rise to her feet and close the distance between them. Tara took the smaller woman in her arms and held her fiercely close while Willow clung to her and tried to still her jerky breathing. "Something's wrong," she moaned into Tara's shoulder. "I can still do the spells, but it's so hard! Even the easy ones! It used to be like... like breathing, I just did it, it just happened, and now I have to make it happen and I don't get it, nothing's changed, I still--"

"Shh, shh, it's all right," Tara crooned, stroking her hair. "You shut down a dimensional gate practically all by yourself, on sheer willpower. Or Will power." Willow managed a quavery smile. "It's only been a month. The aether out by the factory is still all shaken up. Is it any wonder you are, too? Give yourself time to heal."

She felt Willow take a deep shuddering breath and let it out. A moment later she pushed away slightly; in the morning light Tara could see the charcoal smudges of weariness around her eyes, lying just below the transparent porcelain of her skin. Beautiful had never seemed a sufficient word to describe Willow. Willow had something beyond beauty, some fey quality that caught at your heart from half-way across the room and drew you closer, desperate just to be near this creature whose every breath and movement scattered magic with careless generosity in her wake. For the first few months she'd known her, Tara had been terribly afraid that she'd wake up one morning and discover that Willow had only been a dream.

And she wasn't, of course--she was a living, breathing woman, stubborn and loving and heedless and brilliant, fearless with the courage of one who has never truly known defeat and terrifying for the same reason. "Maybe... maybe it's...better this way. That you slow down a little. You've been pushing yourself so hard all summer, and between slaying and school..."

Willow's eyes clouded. "The things we fight don't slow down."

"You can't save the world all by yourself." Tara put a finger beneath Willow's chin and lifted her head. "That's Buffy's job. And even she's got help."

A sigh. "Oh, all right, if you're going to use rational argument on me..." Willow cuddled into her shoulder. "I'll try to be less spazzy. Promise. But I still think--"

"Later," Tara said firmly. "Breakfast now."

*****

Dawn and Buffy were already in the kitchen when they came downstairs. It was a bright, sunny November morning. Willow winced. Pale clear light streamed in through the windows, and outside the sky was blue and the birds were probably singing, but thankfully Willow couldn't hear them. It was difficult to believe that this was a town situated over a Hellmouth. Except, of course, for the fact that at this minute she felt like hell. She only hoped that Tara wouldn't notice. Her eyes were gritty with the aftermath of her magical exercises, and there was a slow, sullen pounding in the back of her head. She would have gone over and pulled down the blinds to keep the stabby sunlight out, or at least asked Dawn to do it, except for the fact that then they'd have asked what was wrong, and she really didn't want to talk about it.

Dawn, seated across the kitchen table from her sister and looking far too bright and chipper to be allowed, was scarfing down Coco Puffs and reading the back of the cereal box. Buffy was stirring her own cereal, which was slowly disintegrating into chocolate gruel, in languid circles. She held up her spoon and let brown, gluey milk dribble back into the bowl, watching the drops fall with utter fascination. Looked like the connection with the world had some static in it.

"Are you going to eat that?"

Buffy started and blinked. "Oh." She looked down at her cereal. "I think it's left the realm of chocolate goodness and entered the realm of performance art."

"Waste not, want not," Dawn said from the safety of her cardboard defensive emplacement.

Buffy gave her a look, picked up the cereal bowl, went to the kitchen door, opened it and emptied the bowl into the flowerbed. "Not waste. Mulch." She came back and poured herself a new bowlful.

Was that old Buffy humor or new Buffy weirdness? Willow decided to assume the former and mustered a laugh. "Succinct, yet mildly disturbing." She eyed the Coco Puffs and decided against them. She didn't think she could face a sugar high right now. She opened the refrigerator and pawed through the contents--leftover macaroni and hotdog casserole, yuck, Buffy's stash of yogurt fruit cups, yuck, milk jug half-full of pig's blood for Spike, double yuck... bread. Boring squishy Wonder Bread. With which one could make toast. Bland, dry, boring toast. Yes. Bland was of the good.

Dawn and Buffy kept up a mild sisterly snipefest as she waited for the toast to pop, which would have been annoying except that it was such a relief to see Buffy reacting to things again. Dawn kept peering at her round the cereal box as if she couldn't quite believe she was having a normal argument with her bossy older sister.

"You seem to be in a good mood this morning, Buffy," Tara observed, coming in with the morning paper. Willow felt a surge of justification, balm after the last month, and even her magic-induced headache seemed to ease off. When even Tara had to admit the Raising had worked, had been, in the end, a good thing...

Buffy made a dismissive half-shrugging gesture. "Spike and I had a fight last night, and--"

"That's too bad--oh, cool! Look, here's the advertisement Anya put in for the Magic Box!" Dawn pulled the paper over to admire Anya's entrepreneurial genius as Tara gathered up her books. Tara kissed the top of Willow's head. "Byzantine history calls. See you later, sweetie."

"Bye." Willow sat down, maintaining a surreptitious watch on Buffy's expression--well, maybe, if surreptitious meant 'eyes glued anxiously to face while trying desperately to appear otherwise'. Improving? Not improving? Buffy gave her a flinchy, worried look and Willow forced herself to be cool. "Fight? I thought the two of you were getting on like gangbusters." She took a nervous bite of toast and swallowed it a little too quickly, coughing as the crumbs scratched her throat. "Though gangbusters, it does sound pretty fighty, doesn't it?"

"You didn't hit him again, did you?" Dawn asked accusingly. "It's totally not fair when he can't hit back."

"No, I did not hit him," Buffy said, taking a stab at her innocent coffee cup with a spoon, as if practicing staking moves. "We were in the middle of Willy's, and I'm not about to have a public fistfight with Fang-face. We just had... words."

Willow scraped margarine over her toast. Nothing like gossip to alleviate pain. "And these words filled your heart with chipperness? So, dish."

Buffy considered. "Not as such. It was just..." She made a vague swirly gesture with both hands. "...a non-revelation. Before the fight started I was happy and trying to figure out why I was happy, so I could, I don't know, use the scientific method to duplicate the process or something. And couldn't. I went to bed all worried about it last night, and when I woke up there was the answer. An answer. A thought, at least. It doesn't matter why. It just matters that I was--until Mr. Ooh-what-a-big-pair-of-fangs-I've-got had to go all contrary, anyway--because that means I can. And that means I will be. Sometimes. Which is all anyone gets, right? No one's happy all the time."

"That's... that's really great, Buffy. But..."

"The fight? It's complicated." She looked significantly at Willow. "I'llway elltay ouyay atway unchlay, enwhay Awnday's otnay aroundway otay efendday ethay annoyingway ampirevay."

Dawn rolled her eyes, the teenage personification of sarcasm. "Golly gee, I just don't know how you guys manage to hide your secrets so well. I am baffled, I tell you, baffled. Hey, if you were at Willy's, were the guys in back still playing for kittens? 'Cause I really wanted one and Spike said I'd have to--"

Buffy's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about Willy's back room?"

A flicker of alarm crossed her sister's face and disappeared in record time. Dawn shrugged, elaborately casual. "Spike must have mentioned it." She began shoveling spoonfuls of soggy chocolate into her mouth. "Gaw geh t' schoo."

"Did Spike take you to Willy's? You, underage human-type girl? Willy's, gross disgusting demon bar?" Buffy leaned forward over the table with a fair approximation of the look her mother used to use when grilling her about her own unsavory teenaged wandering. "If he took you to Willy's he is SO dust. Spike, stake. Stake, Spike."

Unfortunately Dawn was far more resistant to The Look than Buffy had ever been. Or maybe Buffy just wasn't doing it right--it was hard to wrap oneself in the cloak of quasi-parental authority with a spoonful of Coco Puffs in your hand. "Um, Buffy..." Willow pointed. Buffy looked down, confused. Her hair was dragging in the cereal. She jerked upright and swiped at the ends of her hair with a napkin.

Whatever the reason, Dawn's big innocent blue eyes simply got bigger, bluer, and more innocent, and she rolled them piously ceilingward as she grabbed her book bag and slung it over one shoulder. "Geez, Buffy, chill. You know I hung out with Spike a lot over the summer, while he was playing 'My bodyguard the vampire' all the time. We might have stopped at Willy's once or twice when he had to buy blood. Which would you rather, he take me inside with him or leave me in the parking lot by myself? Besides," she added, "who's calling who underage?"

"Excuse me, I'm almost twenty-one and legal in lots of states," Buffy retorted. "Just not this one. You are barely fifteen and... not. And stop changing the subject!"

Dawn didn't crack. She tucked her hair casually behind her ear and smiled a cool, superior smile. "I thought the subject was underage bar-hopping? Which one of us has been doing within the last twenty-four hours? That one not being me?" A horn sounded outside. "That's Lisa's mom. Can I go now, or are you going to play Spanish Inquisition some more?"

Buffy gave up and buried her nose in her coffee. "Oh, go to school." Dawn grabbed her book bag and bounced out the front door, Buffy frowned into her coffee cup and stirred in another packet of Sweet-N-Low. "I bet she's lying through her pearly white teeth. If I really want to know the details, I'll have to grill Spike. He's more crackable... of course, that would mean deliberately seeking out Spike. My interview's at ten. When do you want to meet for lunch?"

"Sociology lets out at eleven-thirty. Noon?"

"It is the traditional lunch hour, true. Can I see the paper a sec? Anya'll get all sniffly if I can't say I've seen her ad."

Willow handed her the community section. "Page six. Right next to that article about the guy that freaked out in the Espresso Pump."

"Freaked out in..." Buffy frowned and folded the paper in half, perusing the article more carefully. "This says it's just another of the rash of mysterious mental collapses over the last year... the last year? As in not stopping since Glory went away? This can't be good. Wills, we so need to talk--a bunch of non-Spikey non-fighty stuff came up last night that we're going to need you in on."

"Really?" Willow knew she sounded cranky but was too headachey to make the attempt to overcome it. "Cause last night, it sounded like not so much."

"Last night it was freakout, one, temporary. Willy's not exactly a well-beloved member of the community; anyone could have gotten torqued off and done a freakout spell on him." She tapped the newspaper article with a forefinger. "Now according to this it's freakouts, plague of, continuing long past the point they should have stopped. So Will, I hope you're right about being ready to make with the magic again. We're going need you."

*****

Buffy slid into the booth and set her purse down on the vinyl seat beside her with a sigh. The interview had gone... well, it had gone. She'd never interviewed well, and it didn't help that she hadn't wanted a job as office help at Sunnydale Affordable Mortgage and Loan in the first place. This was impossible. She not only had to find a job that would support her and Dawn, but one which had flexible enough hours to allow for vampire slaying and occasional world saveage. Getting herself up in office drag, plastering a fake smile over her face and talking with the interviewer about actualizing her goals and being a team player was... surreal. '_Previous experience. One three-month stint as a waitress, six apocalypses averted. Last night I beat up three demons, killed two vampires and almost kissed a third... What was that noise? Oh, nothing, just the superego pounding the id with a mallet again..._

The situation wasn't panic-worthy yet; they had the tail end of Mom's life insurance and the money from the sale of the gallery, and the child support checks for Dawn still arrived regularly from their father's bank. As a last resort, she could tuck her tail between her legs and appeal to said father, not that she had any intention of doing so save as an absolute last resort. They weren't going to starve in the streets, but she hated, hated, hated having to agonize over whether or not she'd been right to run out this morning and blow some of The Budget on a re-stock of decent makeup. She'd rationalized it as a purchase that would help her on Employment Quest, but she was well aware that it was a rationalization.

"Hey," said Willow breathlessly, sliding into the seat across from her. "Sorry I'm late. Professor Sorenson had this three-page hand-out, and there was this unfortunate collating incident. "So what's up that you didn't want Dawn to hear?"

Buffy looked carefully around the café. The lone waitress was attending to another table and everyone around them seemed to be absorbed with their own lunchtime travails. She leaned forward and placed both palms flat on the table. "Rule Number One, no freaking."

Willow looked a little uneasy, but nodded. "Agreed. Designated freak-free zone starts here."

"Rule Number Two... I can't think of a Rule Number Two, but it sounded silly to have a Rule Number One all by itself." _Babbling. You're babbling. Stop it. Willow will get you for trademark infringement_ . She took a deep breath. "OK, Will, I know you're with Tara now and all, but you still... um... _notice_ guys, right?"

"I'm an equal opportunity noticer," Willow said, cautious. "Though any conclusions drawn from the noticing are purely academic."

Buffy rubbed the base of her right thumb, trying to ignore the sense-memory of that cool agile tongue flicking over her skin, soft and wet but not too wet... "So... if I said I'd started to notice that Spike's, um, nice-looking in certain lights, would you consider me completely insane?"

"Uh..." Willow rubbed her nose, perplexed, but was saved from immediate response by the arrival of the waitress. "Tuna salad sandwich on rye, and can I get it with the little froofy things on the toothpicks? Those things are so cool... What do you want, Buff? I still get parental subsidies, I'm buying."

"Caesar salad, dressing on the side." Buffy watched the departing waitress suspiciously, then turned back to her friend. "So, would you?"

Willow stared at her for a long moment, and to Buffy's everlasting gratitude did not ask if she were under another spell. "I'd consider you insane if you didn't think Spike was nice-looking in certain lights. You just now noticed this?"

"Yes. I mean, no. I mean... in the abstract. Spike's... nice-looking." _In the lean, panthery, drop-dead-gorgeous sense of 'nice'_. "It's just that the looks of Spike are pretty much irrelevant given the soulless-killerness of Spike, and until... well... right this minute... the back of my mind looked like the end of that Indiana Jones movie, with rows and rows of neatly crated wrong lusty Spike thoughts stretching off to infinity, and now for some reason they're starting to break out of the crates. And worse?" She leaned forward, her eyes gone wide and tragic. "I think... I think I'm starting to... _like_ him."

"I can see where that would be unsettling," Willow said, poker-faced.

Buffy sat back and folded her arms across her chest, pouting. "This isn't funny, Will! I was having _fun_ last night! The kind of fun I have with you guys. Spike's not allowed in the Buffy Fun Club. Or he shouldn't be."

A busboy appeared and deposited ice water and napkins. Willow picked up her glass, slurped up an ice cube and began crunching it noisily. "Why not? We didn't exactly spend the summer ignoring him. It wasn't unknown for Spike to engage in extracurricular Bronzing with us, and he and Xander had that whole dueling CDs thing going for awhile--" She dissolved into little snorts of laughter. "You should have--he--with the Patsy Cline, and the expression on Spike's face--"

"A laugh riot, but you had to be there?"

Willow wiped her eyes, looking guilty. _OK, maybe a little heavy on the irony there, Buff_. "Um, yeah. And Giles--Giles is all mad at us now because of the whole..." Her eyes slid away from Buffy's and glued themselves to a spot on the tabletop, and she began twisting her paper napkin into a corkscrew. "..return from the dead thing, but there were, you know, definite signs of restrained British bonding before that."

"Oh." Buffy propped her chin on her fist and frowned. "Did you know Spike likes poetry?"

This proved sufficient to distract Willow from the mutilation of her napkin. Her brows quirked. "He never told me so in so many words, but he was helping me catch up with my Western Lit when I was out of school for that week--" _Right after you brought me back from the dead, but let's not go there,_ "--and no one knows that much about archy and mehitabel if they don't like poetry. Plus he helped Dawn with her English while she was in summer school. You knew that. Didn't you?"

"Oh. Again." Buffy felt vaguely disconcerted. She'd been getting rather fond of the idea that she'd discovered something about Spike that no one else knew. "I haven't been noticing things very well lately. The things I should notice, anyway."

"Look, Buff, have you ever considered that maybe these noticings are connected somehow? Spike's gotten... um..."

"Much less homicidal?"

"That's a good way of putting it. I don't know if he'll ever be all the way good, but he's... not bad. You saw how mad Giles and Tara were at both of us after we... you know... but neither one of us got shown the door and asked never to darken his doorstep again. Maybe it's just because Giles still needs us to finish up that big interview paper thingy I'm helping him with, but the point is we both get to stick around and get yelled at. Spike's one of us now." She stopped and looked at Buffy curiously. "That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Yes... yes, it was. I just... I never thought about it involving... me." Buffy frowned and stirred her slowly melting ice cubes while Willow squirmed slightly. The food arrived. Buffy speared a lettuce leaf and let her fork hover over the dressing for a second, then sighed and popped the greenery into her mouth bare. Those nachos last night had probably contained a million calories, all migrating straight to her hips at this moment. All Spike's fault; probably some weird vampire ability to divine that cheese was her culinary downfall.

Willow interrupted her musings. "Maybe your crates are breaking open _ because_ you're starting to like him. Because you _can_ start to like him, because he's turning into someone likeable. And you're not insane, because the rest of us are liking him too." She grinned. "Some more than others, of course."

"I guess that makes sense." Buffy wrinkled her nose. "I'm new improved Clue-Free Buffy with thirty percent less insight. I'll deal. Now we get to the exciting post-fun argument." Willow clasped her hands in front of her and looked expectant. "While we were at Willy's, we got drinks--seltzer, seltzer!--and I was going to charge them to the Council as a slaying expense. Giles said if he couldn't get me a salary then we could at least do a little creative accounting with his. And Spike ordered human blood, of course, and I didn't even think to call him on it until he tried to get take-out later. Then I said I wasn't going to pay for it, and told him to take it back, and he got mad, and I got mad, but my moral high ground was severely eroded from not having objected right away, and then we got distracted by demons, and... other things... and--DAMMIT, he ended up taking the stuff home after all!" Buffy smacked the table and the silverware jumped.

"Welll..." Willow appeared torn. "The human blood thing is of the bad, technically, but it's not like he gets it very often, and...honestly? We've kind of looked the other way when he does. It doesn't seem to, um, affect him for the worse, if you know what I mean--not like he chugs a bag and gets all nostalgic for killing people."

"Maybe," Buffy grumbled, "but it's still wrong."

"I don't see the problem," Willow said. "Angel drank bagged people blood all the time. He had a whole fridge full. Of course he had a lot more money than Spike does..."

Buffy fixed Willow with an evil glare. What was up with this using of reason and logic? "Angel never rubbed my nose in it." Uncomfortable silence. "All right, I admit it, I'm wigging unduly over something that never wigged me before, and do you know why? I hope so, because I don't."

"I don't think it's that difficult, Buffy. You've got an incredibly hot guy who's head over heels for you and he just happens to be a vampire. Think back to the last time this happened."

"Whoa." Buffy held up both hands. "_So_ not going there."

"Exactly! Last time you fell for a vampire the world almost ended. And with the chip, potential Spike-related heartbreak abounds if it ever goes blooey. So naturally you're going to try to avoid it happening again, and hence, the wig."

"But it's not! I am nowhere near falling for Spike. I merely find him somewhat attractive in a purely academic, non-touchy sense, and if I can go back to avoiding thinking about it, everything will be exactly the way it used to be."

"Except that you used to hate him and now you like him."

"And that makes everything complicated and annoying." Buffy stabbed vindictively at her salad. "This is the badness that comes of liking vampires. It never happened with Angel." Uncomfortable silence. "Not that I didn't like Angel. I loved Angel." The even more uncomfortable memory of a night three years gone, standing at Angel's side in the Magic Box, while Spike's contemptuous North London voice drawled _You'll never be friends_ ... "OK, 'like' could never fit into the same room with me and Angel, given that all the space was taken up by buckets of romantic angst, and--that's it, Will!" She thumped the table again and Willow grabbed her water glass. "I shouldn't run from this whole friend thing, I should embrace it, because friendship equals death to romantic weirdness!"

"When did romance make an entrance?" Willow asked. Buffy paid no attention.

"Spike. Friend. Yes. The perfect solution. It'll be just like me and Xander. Slaying partners. Talking buddies. No more noticing of--" _Electric blue eyes that crinkle when he smiles and knife-edge cheekbones and expressive, deadly hands and the intriguing twitch of muscles beneath that ubiquitous black t-shirt and we don't go any lower than that because Spike absolutely, positively does not exist below the belt buckle and the memory of his reaction to you squirming around on his lap under the influence of that engagement spell which by the way was ALSO all Willow's fault never, EVER kept you up at night--_ "--stuff. The thing is, just because I can notice doesn't mean I should be. Spike's... he doesn't care about _people_, Will. About me, about Dawn, about the rest of you, yeah. But about Willy, or some random guy on the street? No. He can't. No soul. And what's it say about me if I... accept someone like that as--as..."

"A friend?" Willow said quietly.

Buffy moaned and dropped her forehead to the table, narrowly avoiding her side bowl of dressing. She sat back up straight and said with great determination, "Freakouts. We're going to talk about freakouts now. We need to know how many of them there've been since last spring. Can you find that out for me?"

Willow nodded, looking pleased. "I can do a search of the newspaper's archives tonight, and maybe hack into the hospital admissions records and the police's missing persons files--well, no, that's so huge it would be pointless. When do you need it?"

She looked so eager that Buffy was tempted to say "Fifteen minutes" and see what happened. A guilty pang went through her. She'd been avoiding Willow, she knew that, and now that she was starting to get a grip on the world again, she was beginning to feel bad about it. "The sooner the better. Let me know when you've got the info and we'll rally the troops." A thought struck her. "Do you know what happened to the rest of Glory's crazies?"

Willow shook her head. "No. We were distracted. They just wandered off, I guess. We could check at the hospital, or..."

"Of course," said Buffy, resigned. "My favorite place in all the world. Hospital it is. You said you were ready to fire up the spells again. You're sure about that?"

There was the barest hesitation before Willow nodded again. "I am. What do you need?"

"For a start, the spell you cured Tara with. I have a feeling we're going to need it."

*****

Evening. Thursday. On Thursday he checked the others. Always the first thing.

Tanner scrambled over the piles of refuse, shards and pieces of other people's lives, other people's minds. Avoid the caretaker's trailer, touch the rusted "No Private Dumping" sign, follow the barbed wire fence back along its snarled length to the cluster of sheet-metal and cardboard hovels hidden from view by the mounds of trash. Some of the others were out already, gathered around a fire in an old oil drum. Still more were hidden away inside their lairs. He could feel them, all of them connected inside by the fingers crawling from mind to mind, hunting and never finding. Dana, Ronnie, Jim. The Rabbit Guy. Blondie. Their eyes followed him as he passed by, wary, scared, madder than his own. He counted them off one by one. Fourteen. The list had been longer once, then shorter, and now it was longer again. That was good. Meant he was doing his job.

"I'm hungry, Tanner," Blondie whined at him. He didn't answer her. Food wasn't his problem. She'd chewed off the Press-On nails again and her fingertips looked raw and bloody. Stupid. You could be crazy in Sunnydale and live, but not stupid. Walk around smelling of fresh blood and the list would be one name shorter, if not tonight then soon. He didn't care...

"Ah, shit," he muttered. If the list got shorter he was a bad person. "Ronnie, do we have band-aids?"

Ronnie, small and grey and balding, ceased his rocking back and forth on the upturned paint can and shook his head.

"All right. I'll get some. Can you take her over to..." _Where?_ "The One Small Step headquarters? We haven't hit them for a month. Get her hands cleaned up."

Ronnie nodded and looked at the ground. Went back to rocking. Tanner sighed. He could feel it slipping away, what he'd taken, fizz fizz fizz in little green sparks leaking out of eyes and ears and dribbling from his mouth with every word spoken. Time again. The Rabbit Guy started screaming. Oh, yeah. Way past time.

Tanner headed back towards the exit from the dump, following the winding path beaten by the sanitation trucks. "Get people together, Ronnie. We're hunting tonight."


	5. Chapter 5

_ The roar of the motorcycle's engine reverberated through the endless tunnels of stone. Her body pressed tightly against his back, the only spot of life in the stygian darkness, warming him even through the leather. Warmth, but no softness was left in her; she was slim and hard and deadly, the strength of her arms wrapped round his waist like steel. Terribly strong, and terribly fragile. He wanted to turn around and hold her in return, but they weren't out of the tunnel yet, and looking back would ruin everything. He kept his eyes fixed on the stony floor of the cavern as they rode along, weaving in and out between forests of stalagmites. How long had it been? He couldn't remember, and he was getting hungry._

_ "We could stop for a bite, love!" he shouted, but she couldn't hear him over the engine noise. But then, he knew she didn't want him to bite, so maybe she was just ignoring him. Demonic fury boiled up in his breast and he felt his face shifting, but there was no one but himself to fight._

_ She sobbed against him. She only cried when there was no one to see. His anger evaporated, and he pointed ahead, to where pale light blossomed at the end of the tunnel. "Look, love, there's the end. We'll be outside soon."_

_ Her silent, awful weeping continued, and he knew with sinking certainty that it was the prospect of escape that tormented her. And he knew what he had to do. He twisted in the seat in one of those contortions possible only in dreams. He had one glimpse of her face, of the quiet, terrible sorrow in her eyes transmuting to relief and peace, before his fangs met in her neck and she faded away into nothing, disappearing like mist in sunlight._

Thump.

Spike jolted awake, the dream shredding as the waking world intruded on his senses. He lay motionless beneath the blankets, locked in place by a tension as deep and cold as permafrost, and wished his heart could still pound, just for the relief of feeling it slow again. He forced himself to draw a deep breath and relax, muscle by muscle. After a moment he rolled over and peered over the side of the bed. The haphazard pile of books and magazines accumulated there had collapsed of its own weight again, precipitating a minor paper-slide. He regarded the mess, then sighed and tossed the fallen volumes back on the heap. He should shovel it all back onto the bookshelf, though it was hard to see the point since the whole lot would inevitably migrate back again within a week.

He lay back and folded his arms behind his head, frowning up at the canopy overhead. If he had to dream about the Slayer, couldn't his subconscious have obliged with something more entertaining than this half-arsed testament to an obsolete classical education? Spike threw off the covers with a low, irritated growl and got up. His internal clock informed him that it was approaching four in the afternoon. Bugger. He'd overslept and missed Passions. He flipped on the light to dress--habit, nothing more, since he could see perfectly well in the pitch darkness--and wrestle his hair into some sort of order.

Part of the dream had been straightforward enough. His stomach rumbled as he climbed the stairs to the upper level of the crypt, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the late afternoon light. He ambled over to the fridge and surveyed the contents: A few swallows of pig's blood in a styrofoam take-out cup, the bagged blood he'd obtained last night, a half-empty bottle of black olives, and a scraped-dry jar of crunchy peanut butter. There was Weetabix on top of the fridge, but when he tilted the box it contained only a thin layer of crumbs at the bottom. Time for a grocery run, then. He felt around in the pockets of his jeans and came up with a grand total of twelve dollars and fifty-three cents. That might cover a pack of fags and a pint or two, but just barely.

"Spike, old mate, a spot of dishonest toil looks to be in order." He considered his options. He could go down to the Bronze and hustle pool, or better yet over to one of the bars near the UC Sunnydale campus--too many people knew him at the Bronze, and marks were getting harder to come by. Or he could just lift a few wallets, though the chip made that risky if he got caught. Or he could try heading over to Buffy's place and cadging breakfast there--he ended up at the Summers' residence often enough these days that Dawn had added pig's blood to their regular shopping list... but somehow after last night that had a riskier feel to it than unarmed robbery. "Or you could just drink your brekky and stop whinging. There's an idea." He pulled out one of the bags of blood and the old 'Kiss the Librarian' coffee mug he'd acquired from Giles, and started to bite off the corner.

And hesitated, plastic between his teeth. _Buffy wouldn't like you doing that_. Amber flecks coalesced in his eyes and dissolved again. After a moment he growled softly, bit down and tugged. "Sod what Buffy likes." And stopped. _Pull the other one, you great nance. You know bloody well you're going to roll over and do whatever she wants you to in the end, so why not just hand her your balls on a platter right now and be done with it?_

He set the bag down on top of the refrigerator and glared at it as if it were the author of his troubles. "Right, and what did she ask you to do, exactly? Take the blood back so the shop wouldn't have to pay for it. Moot point now, innit? Drink up." He picked the bag up. Set it down again. Clasped both hands behind his back and began pacing restlessly. _But you know bleeding well what she meant_. Of course he did. "Never enough for her, is it? Can't kill, can't feed, gotten so pathetically attached to a sodding lot of humans that you're beginning not to want to, and she still wants more?" Spike came to a halt, shoulders tensed, then whirled and pounced. He grabbed the bag in both hands and sank his teeth directly into it with a feral snarl. _Squoosh_ . His teeth didn't puncture the plastic.

He'd forgotten to shift into game face.

"AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGHH!" Spike slammed the bag back down on the fridge. He grabbed the coffee mug and with grim deliberation slit the corner of the blood bag and poured it in. He stalked over to the nearest chair, flung himself down, and took a defiant swallow. Oh, yeeeesss. Rich. Savory. Life itself. Infinitely better than pig's blood.

Still... it would've been better with Weetabix to go with.

And it _was_ ice cold, and tainted with the medicinal tang of anticoagulants. Couldn't compare to what it tasted like pumping warm and fresh from a still-living throat, and Spike had long since accepted that he was never going to taste that particular flavor of bliss again, even if, someday, the damned chip finally wore out. He set the mug down, lit a cigarette, and took a contemplative drag. Would it, really, be that much of a hardship to give up this occasional treat if it would make her...

"Not. One. More. Word." He took another swallow and glared into the mug, daring it to talk back. Buffy'd never asked him to make any of the changes he'd gone through in the last year. For most of the time they'd known one another, she'd been adamant that he couldn't change. In a strange way last night indicated she'd accepted that he had. That he _could_. And that... that was both exhilarating and terrifying. Easy enough to follow the path the chip in his skull prodded him down, and convince himself he had no choice. To keep following that path of his own volition...

To his vast relief, someone started pounding on the door of the crypt.

*****

Xander stood in the long shadows outside the crypt, listening to the echoes of his door-pounding die away inside the crypt and fidgeting. Bad idea, coming here. It was just that all his other ideas were worse. It had been almost a month since he'd exchanged more than a cursory word on patrol with Spike, and he was feeling distinctly awkward. He ran over what he was going to say in his head for the dozenth time. Not apologizing. Definitely not. Nothing to apologize for, and who apologized to demons who conned your best friend into raising your other best friend from the dead anyhow? Spike ought to be apologizing to them, damn it! Especially Buffy! Oh, wait, he already had. Damn.

He could hear intermittent snatches of conversation from within the crypt, no words, just the low, accented rasp of Spike's voice. He pounded on the door again. He had just about decided that the lack of response meant that Spike really did have other company when the wrought-iron door flew open with a bang. Spike's pale face appeared, sporting a ferocious scowl and a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He looked thoroughly pissed off. No shock there; pissed off was Spike's ground state. "Oh, it's you, is it? What the bloody hell's wrong with you, knocking instead of barging in like you own the place?" the vampire snarled.

"Because barging in on you usually results in seared eyeballs. I heard voices. Or rather, voice. Harmony back, or are you practicing pick-up lines on another robot?"

Spike affected boredom. "Long walk, short pier, Alexander Harris. Mix well."

"Ooh, tetchy." Xander peered over the vampire's shoulder. He hadn't been to the crypt in almost a month, and in the blue shadows of late afternoon the interior looked different. The big marble sarcophagus still loomed at the end of the room, and the old black and white television and the mini-fridge were familiar, but the ratty overstuffed armchair and attendant packing crates had given way to a scattering of less dilapidated chairs, chests and low tables. Over the summer Spike had taken the fit to 'stop living like a bloody anchorite' and had flung himself into dragging home all manner of scavenged furniture and appliances. Xander had actually helped him move some of the larger pieces in downstairs, but since Buffy's return... "At times like this I find it helpful to break out the sock puppets. Then you merely look geeky rather than insane."

"Well, yeh, if that's your goal I'd say you've succeeded admirably." He glanced down at the bag in Xander's hand, nostrils twitching. "What do you want?"

"Who says want? I just happened to be in the neighborhood..." Spike looked at him. Not buying it. Xander hunched his shoulders. This was going to be hell. "Look, right after Buffy came back, I was... Things got said... not that they weren't perfectly justified things, but..." Xander grit his teeth and forced himself to continue, "If Buffy can... then I guess I... Sanctuary?"

A demon of mirth flickered to life in Spike's eyes and the corners of his mouth acquired a wicked curl. "Let me guess. The demon bird's got some less than manly wedding-related activity on the schedule."

Xander passed his free hand over his eyes and groaned. "She wants me to look at flower arrangements."

"Squealing in girlish glee at the prospect, no doubt."

"There was some vocalization in the ultrasonic, yeah. So I told her I'd love to, but I'd already made plans."

"Ahhhh. Let me further guess: none of your mates from work are available?"

Xander feigned deep interest in the weeds growing along the edge of the doorway and kicked at the doorpost of the crypt. "Fishing trip." At Spike's raised eyebrow he clarified, "I don't deal well with bait. Besides, I do the Blair Witch thing on a daily basis. Who needs to travel to the piney woods for creepy near-death experiences when I can stroll over to your place?"

Spike took a drag on his cigarette and flicked ash in Xander's general direction. "And therefore you're thrown back on the company of the soul-challenged bloke you swore you were never going to speak to again?"

Xander heaved a resigned sigh. "It's that or go visit my parents. And frankly, given a choice between a bloodsucking creature of the night and my family..." He made an 'eh' gesture with his free hand. "It's a close call."

Spike folded his arms and leaned against the doorway. "Care to explain why exactly I ought to take pity on you, me bein' evil and all?"

Xander held up the paper bag and waggled it. Sauce was beginning to soak through the bottom. "I brought wings."

The vampire cocked his head to one side, obviously enjoying Xander's discomfiture, and allowed the wicked quirk of his lips to blossom into a full-blown smirk. "Well, why didn't you say so? Lassie come home, all is forgiven."

Xander followed him inside and kicked the door shut behind him. "I still hate you, y'know."

"Right, I'll keep it in mind. Did they come with those little carrot things?"

"It's not that I don't love her to pieces," Xander said, setting the bag of wings down on the nearest table and flopping into an adjacent chair. Spike made the noise which meant he was pretending to be interested and produced a bowl from somewhere to put the carrot sticks in. "I mean, I'm marrying her, right? But she drives me absolutely insane sometimes. Normally Anya's up front about everything--that's one reason I love her, right? No guessing games. But for some reason this whole wedding thing has turned her into a space alien. I know if I hang around and let her turn the puppy eyes on me I'll end up spending the whole evening debating the merits of the Spring Mist Arrangement over the Daffodil Rhapsody. If I don't venture an opinion she'll get hurt because I don't care about the flowers, and if I do venture an opinion she'll get upset because we don't agree on the flowers. I'm convinced that come the wedding I'm going to enter a fugue state about the same time I enter the church and will remember nothing anyway, so what do I care what the flowers look like? It would make life so much easier if she'd just say 'Here, Xander, this is what I want. Do it now,' instead of expecting me to agonize over something I really don't give a hoot about."

Spike collapsed in the chair opposite and picked up his mug of blood. He looked ruefully at it for a moment, set it down and went over to the refrigerator. He returned with a styrofoam container full of what was, to all appearances, identical blood, and dipped a carrot stick into it. "Bearing in mind that I'll torture you to death with a barbecue fork if you repeat this... Harris, minus the flowers, I know _exactly_ how you feel."

*****

"School newspaper?" Buffy asked.

Willow scrunched down in her seat and hugged her notebook to her chest. The waiting room couch made a loud obnoxious squeaking noise every time either of them moved. "I panicked." She shot an anxious glance at the door through which the secretary (whose desk nameplate proclaimed her Mrs. Finster) had disappeared. "There is a college newspaper. The Sun. Which, you know, makes sense in Sunnydale. And I did think about taking some journalism classes once." She expected Buffy to make a smart remark at that, but Buffy only nodded, and after a brief moment of inspecting her nails, went back to looking at the spot on the far wall which housed the 'Scenic Views of the Rockies' calendar. Whether or not she noticed the calendar itself was subject to debate.

She was a million miles away again, her eyes grave and distant, staring into eternity as if it were the face of an old friend. Willow tried to keep the dismay out of her own expression. She'd been so... so _Buffy_ this morning, and at lunch, but some time in the intervening hours while Willow was off at her afternoon classes it had all disappeared. It had been a big mistake, bringing her here, Willow decided. Hospitals gave Buffy the wiggins under the best of circumstances. And who could blame her? It was all linoleum floors waxed to a scary degree of gloss, and tubes and bedpans and machines that went ping. Even here in the administrative offices the smell of antiseptic and illness underscored every breath they took. With all that had happened in the last year, her mother's death, the plague of crazy people, Ben's betrayal... the whole medical profession was probably on the permanent blacklist for the Buffy Fun Club. The sooner they got out of here the better.

The door across the office opened and Mrs. Finster returned with a folder full of printouts. She trotted over to her desk, fussing with her frizzed hair--she reminded Willow of an elderly and slightly overweight poodle--and spread them out, examining them with a critical eye. "I think this may be the kind of thing you'd find useful for your article. You understand that I can't give you any individual patient information, dearie--that's confidential."

Willow nodded vigorously. "Oh, I know. We're just looking for general trends, you know, how the stresses of modern life affect mental health and, um, healthlessness. Anything you can give us will be just spiffy."

"Are they still here?" Buffy asked abruptly.

Mrs. Finster's severely plucked brows fluttered upwards. "Who?"

"The people in those files. The..." She stopped, clasping her hands together tightly--fearful, perhaps, that they'd escape her. "My mother was... she stayed here for several weeks last winter. There was a whole ward then, of people who'd just... lost it. Are they still here? Can we see them? Talk to them?"

"Oh, heavens, no, we're not a long-term care facility, dearie." Buffy gave her that look of special loathing reserved for total strangers who call you dearie, but Mrs. Finster chose not to notice. "We can't afford to tie up that number of beds. The only reason we had all of them as long as we did was because the CDC was investigating, trying to determine the cause of the outbreak... though they never found anything, so you can't really call it an outbreak, now... most of them were released to the custody of their families, or..." She cleared her throat delicately. "You might want to contact the Social Services people, or perhaps the county hospital--they usually deal with indigent cases."

"You mean they just got... kicked out?"

Mrs. Finster's sweet rosy mouth pursed and she looked quite fearsome for a moment. "Certainly not. I don't know what rumors you've heard, but I can assure you that all of them went through normal checkout procedures. I'm afraid that if you want to discuss the _incident_ last winter you'll have to speak to our lawyers."

"Lawyers?" Buffy looked blank. Willow rose hurriedly to her feet, causing the couch to emit a mournful plasticine screech, and scooped up the folder from Mrs, Finster's desk before she could change her mind.

"That won't be necessary, sorry to take so much of your time, c'mon, Buffy, time to go stop the presses and put the ol' issue to bed!" She took Buffy's arm and all but dragged her out of the woman's office. Buffy shook her off the moment they were out the door and stood in the middle of the hall, rubbing her arm. Willow tried to catch her eye. "Buff, think about it. They had a dozen physically healthy patients die in one swell foop when that Quellor demon got them, and then a month or two later another couple dozen just up and disappear, and plus the one the Knights of Byzantium broke out under their noses. There's probably half a dozen malpractice lawsuits pending against them right this minute. We know they went to go help Glory build her giant diving board, but I bet the hospital's board of directors wouldn't be jumping with joy even if they did know what really happened. They're going to be really, really testy if we get too nosey-Parker."

Buffy said nothing, standing there in the sterile white corridor with that little half-frown on her face--trying to remember what planet she was on on Fridays. Willow felt an overwhelming sense of frustration. It had all been so good this morning... "Buffy?"

"Hmm? Oh. You're right, I didn't think..." She looked around and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "We should go," she said, and then, so softly Willow could scarcely catch the words, "I hate this place..." She started off down the hallway and Willow hurried after her, trying to stuff the folder into her notebook without dropping its contents all over the floor.

She caught up with Buffy at the elevator, and looked from her to the lighted button on the wall. Buffy looked up at her approach and for a moment was _there_ again, her eyes big and urgent. "Can you fix them?"

Willow glanced at the elevator buttons. "I think it just takes awhile for the car to get here--"

"No... the crazies. You fixed Tara. Could you do it for the others?"

"Sure." The reassurance was an automatic thing, spoken without thought--of course she could fix them. Memory of the spell she'd lost control of earlier nibbled at the edges of her confidence, and Willow pushed it aside. "I mean... probably. Depending." Painfully aware that she sounded nervous and feeble, Willow tried another tack. "The thing is, Glory's not around any more, and--"

The elevator binged at them and the doors slid ponderously apart. The two of them got on and Willow pressed the 'Lobby' button. Buffy bit gently on her thumbnail as the doors closed and the car lurched into motion, and watched as the warm orange glow of the floor indicator traveled steadily downwards. She didn't look at Willow as she spoke, but there was an impassioned note in her voice that was both encouraging and a little disturbing. "It's important, Will. Spike said some things last night...maybe he can't care about people in general, but we should. We're in the world-saving biz, right? But who are we saving it for? It can't be just us. It can't be. When I need a vampire to remind me of that there's something seriously wrong."

Willow bit her lip. "When I fixed Tara I had Glory right there. I was able to suck Tara's essence right out of Glory's head and put it back into Tara's. Glory's gone, so--" She waved one hand to indicate the enormity of the problem. "All the essence she sucked out of people are gone too. And whatever's still doing it? Not Glory. So I can't even be sure that the same spell would work. On whatever it is." She laughed nervously. "Of course I could try Raising Ben and see if that would get us Glory back, but you guys seemed to frown on that--"

"Don't," Buffy said, her voice so flat and dead that Willow flinched. A second later the chill had vanished, replaced by anxious entreaty. "But you can find another spell, right? Are you saying you can't fix them?"

"No, I didn't say that! But you need to give me some time to work on it! There are... complications." The elevator clanked to a stop and the doors opened on a short hallway leading to the main lobby. In stark contrast to the quiet order of the administrative offices, the corridor was full of people: an intern striding by in scrubs, two nurses with clipboards arguing about whether or not Jessica was really going to leave Eric for Rocky, an orderly pushing an elderly black man in a wheelchair. A small horde of visitors, a whole family's worth of children, harried parents, and argumentative in-laws, trooped up to the elevator and clustered around the "You Are Here" building diagram, trying to determine if this was the green or the blue wing.

"Too bad you didn't try to find them over the summer," Buffy said as they wound their way past the line at the information desk. "If you had, you might have a spell which would work on them by now."

Something inside her, grown thin and brittle over the last month full of awkward silences and accusing glances, snapped. Two paces before the doors, Willow bridled, rounding on Buffy in a fury. "Well, I'm sorry, but I was wasting my time helping Giles track down your Dad, and convincing my parents to keep Dawn until we found him, and beating off Social Services, and planning your funeral and keeping Angel and Spike from killing each other during it and, oh yeah, slaying vampires and fighting demons and excess Knights of Byzantium in my copious spare time though why I bothered since Spike the Perfect was on the job--maybe because _someone_ can't go traipsing around in full sunlight or, I don't know, fight humans without collapsing in agony, and oh, yeah, making sure _you_ didn't get brought back as someone's mind-controlled zombie, though I'm beginning to think you'd be happier that way!" She didn't bother trying to keep the hurt and bitterness out of her voice now. "Open!" She flung the word at the front doors like a weapon, and they flew outwards as she stormed through, smashing into the shrubbery outside. That was more like it. That was what magic ought to feel like.

She strode out into the gathering twilight, trying to lose herself in the automotive maze of the hospital parking lot. For a moment Buffy stood dumbfounded, and then Willow heard her footsteps on the pavement behind her as she broke into a run to catch up. "Willow! Willow, wait!" Buffy took a shortcut over the top of an SUV and leaped to the ground in front of her. "Willow, I didn't mean--"

But she didn't sound apologetic; she sounded tired and irritated, like a mother dealing with a sulky child. Willow's hands curled into fists. "You know, I could understand it if you were mad at all of us. But with Dawn you're fine. With Spike you're fine. It's just with me that you act like I'm some horrible person you're forced to deal with. You were my best friend of the girl variety, Buffy! And now you're a total stranger and you hate me and I was trying to do the right thing, darn it!"

Buffy's eyes closed, squeezing shut against the words, and her whole body tensed against some coming blow. "I know that," she said, very softly. "I don't hate you, any of you. But... you didn't do the right thing. You did a wrong thing. You destroyed a soul to get me back--"

"That was Spike's choice!"

"And Spike is so rational on the subject," Buffy snapped. "Maybe it's easier with Dawn because she didn't know all about what the two of you were up to. She's a kid. She's supposed to do stupid--"

"And since Spike is a century older than any of us, he gets a free ride for senility?"

Buffy's eyes opened again. "No," she said, her voice clipped. "Spike gets a free ride for saying the magic words."

"And those would be?"

"'I was wrong, and I'm sorry.'"

"Oh, peachy doodle!" Willow flung up both hands. "Listen to yourself, Buffy! Not six hours ago you were all 'I _can't_ think he's got a cute tush because, the morals of it all!' You know why he's sorry? Because you're unhappy to be back. That's it, that's all, finito, the end. Look, I'm pro-Spike, honest. He's the nicest evil dead guy I know. But you said it yourself, he doesn't care about the morals. And I do care, but my morals don't match up with yours, so I'm awful and Spike's a saint? Pardon me if I think the cuteness of Spike's tush is a bigger factor in how you're treating us both than you want to admit!"

At that moment the automatic lights in the parking lot flicked on all around them, and the two of them were haloed in a multitude of long shadows, vying for space on the asphalt and echoing their every move. Buffy's hand closed on the side view mirror of the SUV and there was a crunching noise, as of metal deforming under pressure, and the brittle snap of glass cracking. "I'm going to forget you said that." If the humidity had been any higher, icicles would have formed on her words. "You want to know why I've been avoiding you, Will? I'll tell you. Because it's exhausting being around you. You want me to be fine so badly it hurts, 'cause that means you did good, even if I won't admit it. And I... I _love_ you, so I keep trying to be fine. For you, and for Dawn, and for Xander and Giles--" The intensity of emotion in her voice was frightening now, after so many weeks of detachment. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "But I can't be fine all the time, and Spike accepts that! He doesn't sit there giving me the 'Are you OK now, Buffy? What about now? Still OK? Sure?' looks when I'm not. It's that simple."

"I'm sure you've convinced yourself of that," Willow said, matching the chill degree for degree. She took a fresh grip on her notebook. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got... things. Things to do." With an angry swipe at her own eyes she pushed past Buffy and hurried off down the long rows of cars, leaving her best friend of the girl variety staring after her, the mangled remains of the SUV's mirror in her hand.

*****

Spike always claimed that he'd picked this particular crypt to lair in because of the location: it was close to a power line he could tap into for electricity, had access to the web of sewer tunnels and caves which honeycombed the ground beneath Sunnydale, and was located on the side of the cemetery closest to the back fence of the police impound lot where he kept the DeSoto. All of which was true, but Xander strongly suspected that the real reason was the really cool windows: deep-set, arched, guarded with romantically gloomy iron crossbars. They let in enough light during the day to make most vampires extremely nervous, but Spike had always had a cavalier attitude towards sunlight--and candles, and cigarette lighters, and anything else in the 'fire pretty' category--for such a flammable creature.

"The place cleans up well," Xander said, with a magnanimous look around the crypt. In the warm golden light of the masses of candles Spike kept in the wall niches and along the windowsills, the place looked downright... comfortable. Several steps above some of the places Xander had called home in the last few years, anyway. "Pity I can't say the same for the inhabitant." He picked up the remote control and flipped idly through a few more channels, wondering when Spike had gotten cable. Stolen cable. Whatever. It had Argentine soccer and Czechoslovakian-language movies starring masked Mexican tag-team wrestlers, which was the important thing. "I do think you lost a certain _je ne sais quai_ when you got rid of the pile of moldering skulls."

"Yeh, wouldn't you know it, a week later I really needed one. Always the way when you toss out rubbish, innit?" Spike dipped his last wing into the dregs of his blood and ripped into it happily while Xander watched with faintly queasy fascination.

"Can you really taste that?"

Spike stopped mid-bite. "No, I just get a thrill from exercising my jaw. 'Course I can taste it."

"Angel said you guys couldn't taste regular food."

The scarred eyebrow quirked. "Bollocks. Can't digest solid food, but it tastes just fine." Spike licked the gory mix of blood and hot sauce off his fingers and leered. "Blood just tastes _better_." He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. "You want to know the real reason the Broodmeister doesn't eat, besides being a self-flagellating wanker who wouldn't know fun if it walked up and bit him in the arse?" He laid a finger aside his nose. "Side effects."

Xander's brow wrinkled. "Eh?"

Spike chuckled. "Not to get crude, but what goes in must come out. On a strict all-blood diet it doesn't amount to much."

"What--oh." An expression of enlightenment spread across Xander's face. "OH. _Way_ too much information, but oh. I can see where Angel'd want to avoid that. Not exactly... dignified, is it?"

"It's human," Spike said. "Peaches never could stand anything that reminded him of that poxy residue of humanity..." He bit into another carrot stick. "Yours truly, on the other hand, finds the variety worth the inconvenience." He hurled the empty styrofoam carton at the wastepaper basket by the fridge and bounced to his feet. "And speaking of inconvenience, I've got things to do, so you can bugger off now."

Xander conspicuously failed to move. He rolled back his sleeve and checked his watch. "Uh uh. I bribed you fair and square, you get to hide me from floral fantasias for the whole evening. My sources have also ascertained that it's Willow and Tara's night to patrol and Dawn's at Lisa's place, and we all know you have no social life outside Scooby Central--" Spike snorted and Xander took the rare opportunity to give him one of his own smirks back-- "So you have no excuse to ditch me."

"Stroppy tonight, aren't we?" Spike grabbed his duster and shrugged into it. "Please yourself--come along if you want, but I'm not going to slow down for you."

Xander got up and reached for his own coat. Half-way into one sleeve he paused apprehensively. "This isn't going to involve breaking and entering, is it?"

Spike gave him one of those deep, nasty vampire chuckles. "Put it this way--I'm not taking you anywhere I wouldn't take Dawn."

"OK, that should... hey. I think I'm insulted."

"Nah," Spike said cheerfully. "No need to think about it."


	6. Chapter 6

"There are seven."

Tanner flinched and froze in the middle of the sidewalk, nearly dropping the filthy mesh bag he was carrying over one shoulder. He looked up. There was one modest patch of winter rye amidst the water-conscious landscaping in front of the Wells Fargo Bank, a pool of smooth, perfect, luscious emerald green surrounded by gravel and the pale, serrated leaves of succulents. The guy with no eyes was standing in the middle of it, and around his feet the grass had turned brown and dry as the winter-killed Bermuda it was supposed to be hiding.

From the moans and whimpers behind him some of the others saw the guy and some didn't. Dana, Jim and Ramon stumbled to a halt and clung to one another, staring about them with wide fearful eyes, while Lizzie, Blue, Matches and Carmel kept walking, straggling halfway down the block before they realized they'd been abandoned. Dana turned uncertainly back and waved. Tanner felt an internal lurch and looked down at his feet. The toe of his right shoe had slipped over the crack between one block of cement and the next. Shit, shit, shit. Reality yawed, ley lines crossed, worlds spun out of kilter... Trying to control his panicky breathing, he slid his foot back ever so carefully, and slowly, slowly the universe around him swung back into balance. He could hear the ponderous groan of the heavens realigning themselves overhead, the metallic screech of the stars sliding back into place. "Don't!" he hissed at the eyeless man.

Who ignored him, and repeated, "There are seven surrounding the Slayer. The Key. The Watcher. The Vampire. The Witches. The Demon. The Man. When the Balance is disturbed the pattern is always fragile. Pull upon the correct thread and the pattern unravels."

Tanner shifted impatiently. The names dropped into his mind, stones into a dark pool, leaving interference patterns of ripples behind. He would have known any of them in an instant now: the dark-haired girl, the bespectacled man, the peroxide-blond vampire from the poolhouse, the small redhead and the taller blond college girls, the girl with the sharp inquisitive face who ran the Magic Box, the dark-haired youth with the silly grin. "What do you want me to do?"

"Take my hand," the eyeless man said, voice as sere as the dead grass. Tanner hesitated for a second, but he'd promised. He stretched out his hand and the eyeless man grasped it. It was cold, cold and dry and withered. Not a dead thing, no, worse, a thing whose life had been stretched beyond endurance until existence became meaningless. He could feel the pulse beating in it, slow and awful, twitching against his palm, and then his own heart was pounding in rhythm, matching that feeble sickening twitch beat for beat. The eyeless man began to chant.

>   
> Where thou walkest, there we follow  
> Where thou bitest, there we swallow  
> Where thou breathest, take we life  
> Where thou strikest, cause we strife  
> Where thou speakest, weave our lies  
> Servant of the Bringers, rise!"

Twinned heartbeats throbbed in his ears, nausea built in his too-empty stomach. With each pulse dark energy flowed from the eyeless man, black, viscous, and chill, sinking into his bones and congealing within his flesh. Tanner yanked his hand away and stood shivering, clutching it to his breast and flexing fingers stiff and stinging with cold. His heart beat of its own accord again, hammering against its cage of bone, but the mad rush of blood through his veins did not warm him. "What...?"

"You are our instrument. Your touch shall open the gates of their hearts and they shall walk through the door into shadow."

Tanner licked his lips, tasting a residue of salt and bile. "Listen," he said, "We gotta hunt."

"Hunt then, but remember your promise. There are lives reserved for oathbreakers far worse than the one you lead."

Tanner hunched his shoulders, brows dipping in a sullen frown. "I keep my promises." There was no answer; the eyeless man was gone again, but the circle of dead grass where he'd stood remained, an urban crop circle to mystify the arriving bank tellers the next morning. Tanner pulled his jacket more closely around his shoulders, feeling the draft where the cool night air seeped in through the torn place in the armhole. He massaged the palm of his right hand with the thumb of his left, trying to work some feeling back into the numb flesh. "Dana!" he called. "Get back."

He waited while Dana herded the others back to the group. Eight. Eight of fourteen. Blondie out of commission because of her hands, and four more too far out of it to be of any help. Ronnie stuck back at the camp to look after them--and that would cost him dearly in the weeks to come, since Ronnie would miss out on tonight's hunt and would soon be in no condition to play backup. "Dirty," he whispered. "All torn and dirty." Couldn't be helped.

"We're going to split up," he said as Dana and the others shuffled back into line. "Like we did that time in July, right? Dana, you take Matches and head out for the park. Set up the circle behind the bandshell." He took the bag off his shoulder and handed it to her. "You remember how to do that, right?"

"Bright and rapture we see the coming day," Dana said. She couldn't talk worth crap, but like silent Ronnie, she still understood pretty well, even on bad days. She was fortunate that way.

"Yeah. Ramon, you take everyone else and find us a new friend."

Stunned silence. At last Ramon ventured, "Tanner... you always..."

"Tonight I can't." He tried to keep his voice calm and level. "I'll meet you at the park later." Tanner started off down the sidewalk, paused, and looked back; Ramon's face was sickly with apprehension in the yellow light of the street lamps. "Don't worry. I know you'll pick someone good."

****

The bar-cum-mediocre-restaurant was called Benders this year. It wasn't a dive, but it wasn't too classy, either--one of those establishments you found in every college town where any lack in the quality of the food and drink was made up by the variety of farm implements and old road signs tacked up on the walls. The patrons were mainly students from the nearby UC Sunnydale campus, along with a sprinkling of locals and the occasional high school senior trying out a fake ID.

_ Pro to hanging out with Spike_, Xander thought as the waitress filled their glasses and set down the pitcher: _Spike is old enough to buy beer._

It was difficult to tell how old Spike had been when he was turned; late twenties, probably, but he had one of those lean, ageless faces that looked more or less the same from twenty-five to fifty. The salient point was that he didn't immediately inspire waitresses to ask for his driver's licence, which was lucky as he didn't have one. Xander passed the vampire a twenty under the table and Spike handed it to the waitress with that half-smile and sideways, heavy-lidded glance which for some inexplicable reason made waitresses go all gooey. "Keep the change, luv."

_ Con: Spike requires my money to do so._

Spike reached for his glass and returned to his seeming perusal of the copy of the L.A. New Times he'd grabbed from the free bin inside the lobby. In actuality he was watching the crowd around the pool tables like... well, like a vampire intent on his next meal. He took a swallow and grimaced. "Lovely. The horse must feel much better now."

"Nothing like good ol' Guinness, huh? Cool. I had this weird urge for beer instead of warm, flat sludge."

"Remind me again why I stopped pinching your wallet?"

"Possibly because I haven't been in arm's reach?"

"I was saving you from yourself, you ask me. Yank blasphemer." Spike squinted at the paper and leaned back in his chair. "And would it be too much to ask for these wankers to hire a music critic who doesn't think he's the second bloody coming of Lester Bangs and just reviews the bloody albums?"

Xander considered asking who the hell Lester Bangs was and decided against it, since that would only provoke Spike to tell him. "So what exactly is our purpose here, besides inducing me to waste more of my hard-earned paycheck entertaining a cranky vampire?"

"Enabling me to collect my hard-earned paycheck." Spike scanned the little clumps of people gathered round the pool tables again, visibly sizing up and discarding prospects. "All you need to do when we get a table is pretend to give me a few pointers, show me the ropes like, and then stand back and let me work. In consideration of your delicate sensibilities, Harris, we're not going to skin anyone who doesn't roll up begging to be skint. Hah, there's one coming open. Come on."

Spike got up and headed for the pool tables. Half-way across the crowded floor the vampire stopped, a puzzled light in his pale eyes, and inhaled deeply. Xander, trying to juggle both glasses and the pitcher behind him, made an inquiring noise. Spike stood motionless for a moment longer, then exhaled. "Thought I recognized... nah, it's gone. Losing the plot, I am." He shook his head and set off for the pool tables again. Xander looked around, seeing nothing unusual in the crowd, then shrugged and followed him. They claimed the middle of the three tables before the previous players had finished hanging up their cues.

"Here we observe the wily vampire in his natural habitat, the pool hall," Xander intoned as he racked up the balls. "Note the exotic coloring of the pelt, designed by nature--or possibly Miss Clairol--to blend in with the cue ball and..."

"I'll pelt you if you don't shut your gob," Spike said, without much rancor. "Now teach me to play pool." He picked up the chalk as if he'd never seen one before and applied it tentatively to the tip of his cue. "Looks like jolly fun," he said in a spot-on imitation of Giles' cultured accent. All traces of North London vanished from his speech, the blue of his eyes went from icy and knowing to soft and luminous, and his body language from predatory to puppyish. "Fill my eager mind with knowledge."

"Uh... fine." Xander picked up a cue and looked nervously around. "Does this make me a shill?"

"Apparently it makes you unnecessarily talkative."

"OK, OK, just asking." This was probably a bad idea, he thought. But it was a couple of steps up from Spike's other methods of getting ready cash, most of which involved out and out larceny, and how many more chances was he going to get to be irresponsible and stupid with a reasonably clear conscience? He was getting married in... oh, God, only a month, and Anya would probably skin him if she found out about this--if only because he hadn't demanded that Spike give him a cut of the profits. Spike was eyeing him impatiently, drumming his fingers on the side of the table. Xander cleared his throat loudly. "The idea is to use the cueball--that's the white one--to knock the other balls into..."

Spike nodded, hanging raptly on his every word. In fact, ultra-cool vampire-guy Spike seemed to have completely disappeared, replaced by an earnest and slightly clumsy young man who'd had a bit more to drink than was good for him. He looked a great deal like Spike, and sounded a great deal as Spike might have sounded had he gone to Oxford instead of wherever the hell he'd misspent his youth, and played pool about as well as Spike might have if he hadn't had a century-plus of practice, reflexes Minnesota Fats would have killed his mother for, and a tolerance for alcohol bordering on the phenomenal even for a vampire.

Exactly the sort of fellow, in other words, that you wanted to get into a friendly wager with.

Spike set the stage carefully, Xander had to admit. He lost several games against Xander, but not too badly, and won once or twice, but not too well. He killed the first pitcher without much help from Xander, played another couple of games against a giggly redhead who only wanted to play for points, lost the first by one ball and the second by three, and made serious inroads on a second pitcher. He sulked vocally about how much better he'd do with a real wager on the line, but kept allowing Xander to talk him out of playing for money. At some point during the evening, the guys at the next table, a large, aggressively wholesome pair in letter jackets who'd been flashing a lot of cash earlier, began paying attention. By now, they were hard pressed to keep from snickering at the show.

"Look, Harris," Spike said, leaning forward and poking a finger at Xander's chest. "I've got the hang of it now. What I need is a little com-competitive edge." He was swaying a little and enunciating every word just a little too clearly; Xander, who'd seen Spike really drunk on more than one occasion and knew that it took considerably more than a couple of pitchers of American beer for the vampire to achieve this level of impairment, wasn't fooled, but it was a fairly convincing display for the lay observer.

"Yeah, you've got an edge all right." Xander removed the finger from just below his third shirt button, wondering if Spike expected him to start an argument or back down. "Let's go get you some coffee or something before you cut yourself on it."

A large hand clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, there, don't be so hard on your friend there," Frat Guy Number One said, displaying lots of large white teeth in what was probably a winning smile, if one happened to be a shark. "If he wants a real game, we'll play. I'm David and this is Shaun." He jerked a thumb at his slightly smaller and darker compatriot.

"William." Spike shook the offered hand enthusiastically and pretended to wince at the pressure. "Ever so pleased to meet you."

****

The ivory ball careened across the green felt and struck its target a glancing blow. For a long breathless moment the red ball teetered on the edge of the pocket, and then, bowing to the inevitable, tipped over and dropped in. Spike straightened, beaming at Shaun with a wide-eyed and slightly tipsy smile, stunned and delighted with his own good fortune. "I say!" he cried. "That was a lucky one, wasn't it?"

Theoretically they were playing doubles, but so far Xander hadn't had much to do except sit back, try not to screw up when his turn rolled around, and watch as 'William', after a shaky start, wiped the table with their opponents. Considering the usual results of their own much lower-stakes games at the Bronze, Xander wasn't surprised at the wiping the table part, but there was no way Spike was this good an actor; faking being drunk was one thing, but he'd never been particularly good at deception in the past. Xander leaned over and whispered, "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Spike?"

The real Spike made an immediate reappearance and jabbed him in the stomach with the butt of his pool cue accidentally-on-purpose, ducking his head to hide the pained expression as the chip set off. He injected a note of wounded petulance into his voice for good measure. "Really, Harris, push off--not fair of you to coach, what?"

Shaun glared and ran a hand through his short-cropped chestnut hair, something he'd been doing with increasing frequency and vehemence as the night went on. He might be smaller than David (who really ought, Xander felt, to have been named Goliath) but he still had a good two inches on Xander and a good four on Spike, and he was using them to best advantage. "Yeah, back off. Let Willy-boy shoot."

Willy-boy graced him with a smile which came nowhere near his eyes and began lining up his next shot, screwing his face into a comical expression of concentration. Xander looked from him up into the blunt-nosed, linebacker's face of David, who was currently looming beside him with a distinctly unfriendly air, held up both hands and retreated to the nearest table to nurse his beer. _Pro: Watch Spike take snotty college kids to the cleaners_.

The frat guys hadn't gotten to the point of sounding belligerent yet, but it was beginning to penetrate that their earlier lucky streak against the supposedly inexperienced English guy had run out. Hopefully Spike would have the sense to quit while he was ahead. _Sense? Wait, this is Spike. _David folded his arms and watched as Spike prowled his way down the pool table, his jaw jutting forward. From his vast store of personal encounters with guys who would just as soon pound you in the teeth as look at you, Xander judged that David was still a ways from exploding, but he was getting there.

_ Click_ .

"I've won again, haven't I? Fancy!"

_ Further pro: I won't have to cover Spike's bets to avoid a serious ass-whooping._

A lighter, feminine voice cut through the riot of voices in the background. "...told Kevin I liked him, but that I didn't _like_ him like him..."

Xander frowned. That sounded like...

David's basso rumble overwhelmed it. "...look, one breaking shot, double or nothing..."

Spike fiddled with his cue, distressed. "I don't know, chaps, hadn't I better leave off? Luck can't last forever, you know. Still...not really sporting of me, is it...?"

"...can't _believe_ he said that right in the middle of Mrs. Doormann's class, of all places--"

Xander stiffened and buried his nose in his beer, shading his face with one hand as Dawn, Lisa, and a third girl he vaguely recalled as Morgan (or possibly Megan) sashayed by on their way to the ladies' room, all too-casual hair flips and considerably more makeup than Xander remembered from having dropped Dawn off at Lisa's place earlier. _Wait a minute. Why am I hiding from _them_?_ He straightened up and assumed the awful mantle of adult authority--hopefully Dawn would notice. "Hey! Dawn! Aren't you out a little late?"

Dawn froze at the sound of his voice, and a second later the other two girls, realizing something was amiss, did the same. Her eyes widened in horror. "Xander?" she squeaked.

"Dawn?" Spike's white-blond head snapped up and he stopped mid-shot, eyes narrowing. He set his cue down against the side of the pool table, but he didn't get more than a half-step away before David's meaty hand clamped down on his shoulder.

"Hey! If you think you can walk out now--"

"Sod off." Spike shrugged the hand off and stalked over to Xander's table. Looked like 'William' had taken a powder. "Bloody hell, Bit, it's after midnight. Does Buffy know you're about?"

Dawn grabbed Spike's arm, all but bouncing up and down in agony. "Oh, God, Spike, you're not gonna tell her, are you?" she pleaded. "We were just about to head home, honest! She'll get all freaked out over nothing, you _know_ how she gets--"

That earned her the raised eyebrow thing. "Yeh, and you know how _ I_ get, so the odds of my letting you toddle off home through downtown Hellmouth unescorted would be..?"

Megan's (or possibly Morgan's) jaw dropped, taking in the vampire's full bleached-blond and black-denimed glory. Spike, engaged in a heavy-duty glowering match with Dawn, failed to notice. "_That's_ Spike? Oh. My. GOD. I thought you said he was, like, a million years old!" She tossed her head, toying with her streaked hair, and batted her heavily mascara'd lashes at Xander. "And you're kinda cute too. Geez, Dawn, introduce us!"

Dawn's look could have melted titanium. "Could you possibly be a _ little_ more desperate?" she hissed. "I don't think the entire bar heard you." She waved an unenthused hand from one side of the group to the other. "Spike, Xander, jailbait. Megan, Lisa, engaged guy and... uh... Spike."

A Death Star-sized shadow intervened between them and the nearest overhead light; David and Shaun were approaching, pool cues in hand, looming with menace aforethought. "Look, the family reunion's touching," David said, smacking his cue into his palm. "But there's a little matter of two hundred bucks we need to settle. NOW."

"Hold your water, you feeble-minded tossers!" Spike snatched the cue away and shook a admonitory finger at Dawn. "You budge one inch before I get back and I swear I'll nail your feet to the floor with tent pegs--gerroff, you!" Megan, who'd been inching coyly closer with an eye towards some arm-grabbing of her own, hopped back in a shower of giggles.

David blinked. "When did he start talking like that?"

"You know, this is a really good night for me so far," Xander said brightly. Dawn groaned.

Under the watchful eyes of Shaun and David, Spike strode back to the pool table, all pretense of amateurishness abandoned. He bent over, took aim, let fly with his cue in one smooth, economical stroke and stood back with a clinical eye to observe the balls scattering every which way over the felt. "Four, five, six..." He turned to David with a lift of his scarred eyebrow and the patented Spike smirk. "I believe you gents said double or nothing?"

"Fuck!" Shaun screeched. "There's no fuckin' way you could make that fuckin' shot! This is fucked, man!"

"Some of us are," Spike agreed.

"Too fucking right!"

_ Con: get the shit beat out of you afterwards because Spike can't defend himself against snotty college boys who want their two hundred dollars back._

Lisa shrieked as Spike ducked Shaun's wild swing with the pool cue. Xander leaped to his feet; not only was Spike unable to hurt a human without setting off his chip, the cues were wood and there was an outside chance that Shaun might accidentally impale Spike and do some real damage. Not to mention that if Buffy found out they'd gotten Dawn into a bar fight, there would be no end to the messy painful death she'd arrange for both of them. He gut-punched a totally unsuspecting Shaun, who doubled over with a shocked, painful 'whoof!'--Xander didn't have super-strength, but he'd been fighting vampires for six years and working construction for two, and had considerable muscle to show for it. "RUN!" he yelled, shoving Dawn ahead of him.

Spike shot one gleeful yellow-eyed look at David, and Xander could all but read his mind. A second later the vampire had gone all fangs and brow ridges, lunging at David with a "RRAARRGGGH!" David yelled and fell backwards onto the pool table. Spike vaulted gracefully over his head and hit the floor at a dead run, swooping up Megan and Lisa in the process, though it was difficult to tell if this was out of a sense of responsibility for Dawn's friends or simply because they happened to be in his way. He caught up to Xander at the door and all five of them pounded out into the parking lot, the girls squealing and the men laughing maniacally. _ Bad Xander! This is not in any way amusing!_

Spike yanked open the driver's door of the DeSoto, hopped in and gunned the engine. "Pile in, children!" he caroled as David and Shaun, accompanied by several equally large and irate friends, appeared silhouetted in the doorway of the bar. Xander grabbed shotgun by virtue of superior size, and the three girls crammed themselves into the back seat. "Can't a vamp get a break around here?" Spike gasped, tears of laughter running down his once-more-human cheeks as they tore out of the parking lot at indecent speed. "I wasn't even cheating that time!"

"Someone up there just likes you, I guess," said Xander. "So did they pay you any of the money before the big fraidy runaway?"

"Not a quid."

"Figures."

Something palm-sized and heavy landed on his lap with a thump. Xander grabbed it reflexively--leather? Spike was wearing the insane-vamp grin again.

"But I did manage to nick his wallet on the way out."

****

_It could have been worse. It could have been Buffy. It could have been worse..._

Dawn kept repeating her new mantra as the DeSoto roared along the dark streets, despite scant hope that it would bring inner peace any time soon. It had all seemed like such a foolproof plan when Lisa had suggested it. Lisa's dad was out of town, and her mother slept with earplugs because of her insomnia, so arranging a sleepover at her place and using it as a cover for a night on the town was easy. Catching the late bus over to the college was equally simple. Buffy sometimes patrolled near the college, but if she wanted a break she always went to the Bronze, or more rarely, to Willy's. No one she knew _ever_ went to Benders.

Which was probably why Spike had picked it to hustle pool in. Life just wasn't fair.

Despite the embarrassment of being caught, Dawn had to admit to a smidgen of relief, since while getting to Benders had been easy, the buses stopped running at midnight, and their plans for getting back home had been a little shaky. Neither Spike nor Xander seemed too upset with her, outside Spike's usual outrageous threats of bodily harm; in fact, their victory over the forces of the Letter Jacket Brigade had left them both bouncing off the walls. Spike was steering with one hand and extracting David's cash from the purloined wallet with the other, while Xander rummaged through the vampire's CDs making gagging noises.

"Devo, crap. Sex Pistols, crap. Butthole Surfers, crap... don't you have anything less than twenty years old in here?--hey! This is mine!" Xander shook _Murder_ in front of Spike's nose.

"What can I say? The title speaks to me. There's a Linkin Park in there somewhere."

Xander gave up and slapped a random CD into the machine and the dulcet strains of "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?" blasted out into the night. He eyed the wallet-excavating process. "You're only gonna take as much as they owed you, right?"

"Uh... yeah. 'Course. Bugger all, I have to--double or nothing would have made four hundred, and there's not three hundred here." Spike tossed Xander two twenties. "Here's your beer money, shill. How d'you fancy pool sharking as an occupation?"

"I'm not quitting my day job." Xander tucked the money into his shirt pocket behind his rescued CD as Spike rolled down the window and made to chuck the wallet out. "Hey, hold on to that! There's got to be ID in there, we can mail it back to him tomorrow or something."

Spike slouched down in the driver's seat, lit a cigarette and draped his arm out the window, trailing smoke. "Altogether too much work being a white hat if you ask me," he grumbled, but tossed Xander the wallet again.

Dawn chewed on a lock of her hair. "Are you guys gonna tell..." she asked apprehensively.

Xander looked up from his examination of the wallet; he was apparently scrupulous enough to want to give it back, but not scrupulous enough to refrain from poking through David's stuff. "Well--"

"Your sis has enough on her mind right now," Spike interrupted. "No need to add to her worries, eh?" Dawn slumped back in the seat, relief flooding over her; of course Spike would come through. "If I catch you out running around without your leash again, mind, I'll be taking you home in a plastic baggie." He threw Lisa a look over the back of the seat. "Where's your place again?"

Once out of immediate danger, Lisa had lapsed into temporary shell shock, and was currently staring fixedly at the place in the rear-view mirror where Spike's reflection wasn't. "Twenty-fourth and Ramada," she got out in a subdued squeak. "You can take Wilkins south."

Spike pursed his lips, figuring out trajectories. "Right then. I've got a stop or two to make and you'll be home by two."

"He's not gonna kill us?" Lisa whispered.

"He can't hurt you," Dawn whispered back. "He's got this chip--"

"And very good ears," Spike interrupted. "And I could so kill you if I really wanted. Just so happens I don't want to."

Dawn kicked the back of the seat. "Stop it! You're gonna make Lisa pee her pants!"

"Not in my bloody car. And put your damned seatbelt on, it's down in there somewhere."

The first stop was Kohlermann's Fine Meats, very likely the world's only twenty-four hour butcher's shop. Spike picked up two pounds of raw liver and several gallons of pig's blood in quart containers, and spent a quarter-hour chatting up Benny Kohlermann, who worked the night shift. Back at the car, he stuck a straw through the lid of one of the blood containers and wedged it into the plastic drink holder up front like a Big Gulp, which didn't help Lisa's mental state any. Dawn accrued major unflapability points by nonchalantly helping pack the rest of the blood into the cooler in the DeSoto's trunk. The second stop was the twenty-four hour Safeway on Wilkins, where Lisa thawed slightly, though she kept giving Spike's lack of reflection in the store security mirrors surreptitious glances, and she'd tugged her cross necklace to the outside of her blouse.

Oddly enough, Dawn couldn't remember Buffy having worn her cross necklace since coming back from the dead.

"Are you sure he's... safe?" Lisa whispered to Dawn as the stood in the checkout line with Spike's several purchases.

Dawn shrugged, glancing at the vampire with a proprietary smile. Spike was the most and the least safe person she knew. Supposedly you could tell a lot about a person from their grocery list; what exactly a carton of Marlboro Reds, Nestle's extra-rich cocoa mix, a block of extra-sharp cheddar, one bag of yellow apples, a jar of Jiffy extra-chunky peanut butter, and a random assortment of items from the Dry Crunchy Things To Dip In Blood food group added up to, Dawn wasn't sure, unless it was that Spike was a sucker for anything with 'extra' on the label.

"He won't hurt you, if that's what you mean." She felt a little sorry for Lisa; she'd run into Spike around the Summers house on several occasions and knew him as a friend of Buffy's. Like most people who'd grown up in Sunnydale, Lisa was aware that there were things that stalked the darkness just outside the circles of lamplight--but also like most in Sunnydale, Lisa's family never talked about them. Seeing Spike go all bumpy in public was a shock. It was tough, having to learn about vampires on the streets.

Megan was having no such difficulties. Megan always meant well, but she was blessedly free of the ravages of intellect, whether by nature or by choice. The fact that the dreamy blond guy had temporarily grown fangs wasn't anywhere near enough to discourage her. She gazed admiringly at the back of Spike's sleek head. "How come you never told us you hung out with all these hunky guys, Dawn?"

"It's just Spike and Xander." Dawn tried to inject the proper note of indifferent disdain as they followed the grocery-laden guys out to the parking lot. It was true she'd had a crush on both of them at one time or another, but that had been ages ago--last _year_, for crying out loud!--and she was over that now. It was excruciatingly embarrassing to be reminded of it. She wouldn't have minded nursing her Spike-crush for longer, but Dawn was perceptive enough to know from the moment her sister had gone storming off to Spike's crypt in the Lacy Red Blouse of Protesting Too Much to tell him that she had absolutely, positively no interest in him whatsoever that Spike's unattached days were numbered. Of course at the time she'd had no idea that Spike would do something as colossally stupid as tying Buffy up and threatening to feed her to his ex, but... there was Spike for you. At least he'd learned his lesson. Maybe a little too well.

Back in the car, Megan leaned forward till her pert nose was practically in Spike's ear, folding her arms on the back of the front seat. "Ohmigod, you're totally a vampire, aren't you?" she gushed, jiggling up and down on the seat. "Do you know my sister?" She giggled self-consciously. "That sounds stupid, doesn't it? Like, 'I live in New York', 'Do you know my uncle?' But there's not as many vampires as people in New York, otherwise we'd all be, like, Lunchables by now, right?"

It was probably a good thing, Dawn thought, that Spike's expression wasn't visible in the mirror.

"Actually my sister's in Acapulco right now--I got a postcard." Megan tossed her hair proudly. "She's doing, like, this self-actualization thing, y'know, but she might be home for Christmas. Except Mom disinvited her since last time she stayed at our place she ate the maid, and Mom is _ utterly_ strict about not letting us have food in our rooms, so seeing as you're both vampires and all--Hey, could you make me a vampire? Harm said it was _totally_ intense."

The toe of Dawn's Reeboks bumped into an empty Jack Daniels bottle half-sunk in the sea of fast food wrappers and empty blood bags littering the floor of the back seat. Perhaps with enough sincere mental effort, she could shrink herself small enough to fit inside and free herself from the abomination that was Megan in flirt mode. What she could see of Spike's profile was wearing a sort of glazed, desperate look, as of a man revisiting horrors he'd thought long departed. "No." He took a long pull at his pig's blood Slurpee and ran his tongue over his teeth, apparently struck by a cheering thought. "But as a special favor I might be persuaded to drain you dry and leave your shrunken corpse by the wayside."

Megan shrieked with laughter and Xander swivelled round in his seat to gaze upon her with a look in his dark eyes which approached awe. "Your last name wouldn't be Kendall, would it?"

"It is!" Megan gave him an arch look. "How'd you guess?"

"I went to school with Harmony." An evil smile crept across his face; obviously Spike was rubbing off. "And Spike--"

Spike shuddered. "Tried to kill her once. Didn't take, unfortunately."

Megan dissolved into giggles again. "You're funny."

Dawn scrunched down on the seat, trying to sink straight through the leather upholstery. _That's it, I'm in hell_.

Lisa's family lived on the opposite side of Weatherly Park, and they'd just turned off Wilkins onto Twenty-Fourth and were cruising down the long stretch of road bordering the park. A shadow moved on the road ahead, and Spike slammed on the brakes before Dawn's brain had time to register it was there. "What was that?" Xander asked, craning his neck out the window.

Spike frowned, stroking the steering wheel with his thumbs and staring out into the tangled mass of trees. The branches overhanging the road were half-bare, and the breeze chased little drifts of ghost-grey leaves across the black asphalt ahead. "Some bird over there on the side of the road," he said. "Thought for a minute she was going to take a header into traffic the way old Willy did the other night. She's just sittin' there, now--no, wait, here she comes."

Amidst the fitful stirring of the leaves a darker patch moved. Dawn squinted, trying to make out the figure through the DeSoto's half-blacked-out windshield, but she couldn't make out anything more than an indistinct shape against the trees for several minutes. Then a woman materialized out of the night, heading for forty, with short flyaway hair which might have been sandy blonde in daylight. She was wearing a dark jogging suit, making her even harder to see, and she broke into an awkward, exhausted run when she got near the car. She flung herself at the DeSoto, clinging to the handle on the driver's door with both hands and supporting herself on it. Up close, it was obvious even in the dim light that her face was smudged and leaves clung to her clothes in several places. "Oh, God, you stopped!" she cried. "You've got to help him--it's back there, in the trees--they've got him!"

"They?" Xander was already getting out of the car. "They who?"

"I don't--back, by the--the--" She began to sob, pointing shakily back into the depths of the park.

"You got any weapons back there?" Xander asked, heading for the trunk.

Spike sighed and got out of the car. "Bloody hell. Whoever said there was no rest for the wicked apparently never gave virtue a go. When don't I?" He took the keys from the ignition and went round to unlock the trunk; while Xander was pulling out the implements of destruction, Spike came back up to the front of the car and handed the keys to Dawn.

"Get up into the front seat now, Pidge, and lock yourselves in," he said in the tone that brooked no argument or wheedling. "If we're not back in fifteen minutes, take this lot home and then go get your sister. She should be back from patrol by now."

Dawn looked up at the vampire's angular face, closed her fist on the car keys and nodded. She crawled over the back of the front seat and settled into the driver's seat as Spike closed the door. She felt for the floor pedals with her feet, getting used to their positions again. Not too bad. When he'd first started teaching her to drive (as Spike had neither license, registration, nor insurance, he'd assured her that her lack of a learner's permit was no obstacle) they'd had to adjust the seat for her, but she'd grown over the summer; she wasn't that much shorter than Spike now. She heard Xander slam the trunk closed behind them and looked up at Spike, trying to be mature and capable, and flashed him a smile full of confidence she didn't feel. "OK. I can handle it."

His expression remained serious, but there was a flash of... pride, maybe? in his eyes, and his hand, cool and dry and reassuringly large for someone his size, rested on her shoulder for a moment. "I know."

Then he was gone in a flurry of black leather, he and Xander disappearing into the interlacing darkness of the trees with the sobbing woman tugging them along, and Dawn was left in the dark with a sinking feeling in her stomach and Megan and Lisa in the back seat. For several minutes no one spoke.

"You can DRIVE?" Megan asked.


	7. Chapter 7

"Honey, you already knew she wasn't happy about it."

Willow made no response. She kept walking along the gravel path, faster than she should have in a graveyard in the dark. She could hear Tara's footsteps behind her as she turned off between a pair of huge old cypresses, weaving through the tombstones towards the fence. The grounds keepers seldom penetrated this far. The footpath was faint and the ground uneven, and what graves lay here among the winter-dead grass were untended, perfect spots for tradition-minded vampires to bury their fledglings. Restfield (#5 in the Sunnydale Cavalcade of Death-Related Locations) was a mid-sized cemetery and one of the oldest in town, which meant it was a tough patrol.

Some of the newer ones, with their acres of small, tasteful, flat-to-the-ground tombstones to facilitate the use of riding lawnmowers, could be covered in fifteen minutes or less: stand in the middle and take a quick look round for disturbed graves and you were off. Here you had to hunt through a maze of baroque (and often broken) old headstones and mausoleums. Ironically, it would have been easier had it not been that this was the cemetery where Spike's crypt was located: he strongly discouraged other vampires from horning in on his territory, so any newbie vamps to be found were invariably far off the beaten path, hidden away in some secluded corner.

Willow gripped her stake tightly, feeling the comforting smoothness of the wood against her palm. _Why wood?_ she'd asked once, in a moment of scientific curiosity. _Why not cold iron or silver or milled polyurethane?_ It had taken Tara a moment to realize the question was a serious one. _Because wood's something that was once alive and now is dead, too_. She'd gone on to explain the answers to all the other questions: Sunlight because they're creatures of darkness. Fire because it's a piece of the sun. Decapitation because it breaks the cord between head and heart. All things which would sever the bond between human mind and body and the demon soul which animated them, and allow you to kill a vampire.

The answers had been obvious ones to Tara. She insisted that there was a logic to it, a logic of intuition and emotion. Willow didn't see it; what possible connection was there between shoving a vampire into the sunlight and driving a stake through their hearts? But Tara saw all kinds of connections which eluded Willow. If bad luck followed the casting of a spell, Willow automatically assumed it was coincidence. Tara, born to a family of witch-women, feared and despised by her male relatives, and raised in a community steeped in tales about the evil nature of magic, automatically assumed that the spell was at fault. When she thought about it, Willow really couldn't blame her love for her irrational conviction that every minor spell held the seeds of doom.

"You know how Buffy always holds everything in," Tara went on, "and then it boils over at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. When you've both calmed down, maybe you could--"

"I am calm," Willow said. Anyone else might have believed her. They'd reached the fence, which was overgrown with climbing vines, queen's-wreath and mile-a-minute. The leaves were starting to turn red-bronze in the fall chill and drop away, leaving the wiry stems behind, coiled tightly around the iron bars. She stopped and leaned against the fence, burying her face in the dusty-smelling foliage. Dry, curling leaves collected in her hair. "I'm just completely on my own here. I know the rest of you think I did something terrible, bringing Buffy back. The only one who backed me up was Spike. I couldn't even have done it without his help, but as the Slayer goes, so goes Spike, so now he's switched sides."

Tara leaned up against the wall beside her, folding her arms across her chest. "Maybe that should tell you something."

Willow's face grew bitter. "What, that he wants to get in Buffy's pants as badly as she wants to get in his?" At Tara's soft cry of shock Willow's shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. "I didn't mean that!" she wailed. "Spike _understood_ why I had to bring her back! But the moment she _is _back he's all stuck to her like Superglue and 'Oooh, I was wrong', it's like they've got this treehouse with a big NO WILLOWS ALLOWED sign and every time I see them together I'm all 'No fair, she should be that happy to see me too!' but I know she wants me to apologize and I CAN'T, I can't lie to her and say I think I was wrong when I wasn't, and Spike apologizes for all the wrong reasons and gets a pat on the head so there's all this--this meanness rolling around inside me all tangled up like evil socks in a clothes dryer! And then I say something rotten to Spike so of course he goes and hides in Buffy's treehouse and if I had just one person to talk to who understood it would be ok but the--"

She felt Tara's hands on her shoulders, heard Tara's voice murmuring something soft and meaningless, smelled the familiar wool scent of Tara's favorite blue worsted patrolling sweater. It would be so sweet to sink into the other woman's comforting embrace, but Tara's sympathy was all a sham, and deep down Tara thought she'd done a horrible thing too. Still she couldn't resist the urge to butt her head into the soft scratchy blue doubleknit and cry out all her frustration and anger. "Sweetie, you're tired, you're scared, you're not thinking straight. " Tara stroked her hair. "There's nothing happening here tonight. Let's go find Buffy and tell her we're going home. I'll fix you some tomato soup and we can get some sleep and tomorrow we can figure out how to deal with all this."

Willow snuffled. "I don't want to talk to Buffy about anything."

"You've got to see her sooner or later. We all live in the same house."

"And whose stupid idea was that?" Her own, of course. Give Buffy an income, however small, and some help with Dawn, but more importantly, try to turn back the clock to those first roommate days in college when the two of them had still been close, before classes and boyfriends and girlfriends and differences and death had driven that wedge between them, every day a little deeper.

"What's that?"

Willow felt Tara's hands tense on her shoulders, and the shift of Tara's body as she looked up, back out towards the main path. The crunch of footsteps on gravel grew louder--too loud for a vampire, surely, unless it was a very clumsy one--but there were things other than vampires out there. Scrubbing her sleeve furiously across her stinging eyes, Willow straightened up and began readying a spell; nothing fancy, just a simple fire-starting cantrip. It would be equally effective against both vampires and humans, and at least marginally painful for about fifty percent of the demons they'd be likely to run up against. She shifted the stake to her right hand and groped for Tara's hand with her left. Tara gave her hand a squeeze and together they crept forward, ducking low under the bare trailing branches of her namesake tree. The long slender leaves underfoot didn't rustle at their passing; Tara's gift, not hers. Her love's hand in hers was at once reassuring and childish, a sweet embarrassment; it had been months, almost a year, since she'd had to pool her magic with Tara in order to cast spells. Until the Raising spell had gone wrong, she'd had power to spare.

They dropped to their knees behind a moss-grown gravestone (Selma Kingston, 1891-1963, Beloved Wife and Mother) and peered out at the path through the willow branches. The gravel stood out pale and glowing against the dark grass. A figure stood in the middle of the path, twenty or so feet distant, looking back and forth along the length of the walk. In the mingled light of distant streetlamp and the near-full moon he seemed indubitably human--a dark-haired, middle-aged man in drab, anonymous clothing, with a face that might once have been kind. Now every other emotion had been subsumed in resigned weariness.

_Buffy looks like that_.

"Do you think he's just lost?" Willow whispered.

Tara's intent gaze never left the man's face. "Oh, yes..." she breathed. She shook herself a little and continued in a more matter-of-fact tone, "He's lost."

Willow rubbed her nose, wishing she had some Kleenex. Why weren't there any post-sobfest anti-runny-nose spells? Maybe she could make one up and make a fortune and pay off Buffy's plumbing bills and everyone would like her again... "We should go talk to him, or he'll end up as some vamp's chew-toy."

"I think that's the point. He's out here hoping to get killed." At Willow's horrified expression Tara shrugged. "Some people strike out. Some of us strike in."

"There will be no striking in any direction," Willow said firmly, getting to her feet. Here was a concrete problem she could deal with. Sort of. At least they could get the guy out of the cemetery and into some more vamp-free area of town. "Hello?" she called, scrambling to her feet and brushing grass off the knees of her leggings.

The man twitched violently and spun round to face the sound of her voice, his hands trembling. Not the reaction of someone incredibly dangerous. Willow edged out from behind the tombstone. "Hey. Mister. It's not safe out here."

*****

Something had called to the cold dark thing coiling within him, some silver-sharp pain which pierced it as the stars pierced the sky overhead--for the most part invisible in the greater light of the moon and the sleeping town below, but there all the same. It reeled him towards it on a thousand thousand individual skeins of agony, threaded on needles of white fire, and when the pull at last abated there they stood, rising out of the ground all fey and woodsy, crowned in dead leaves with moonlight spilling from their eyes.

The Witches.

He hadn't expected to find any of them so quickly. Days, he'd thought, days before his path crossed any of theirs, for all that the world of Sunnydale after dark was a small one, and all the paths that ran through it twisted into one another. But here they were. "It's not safe out there," the Red Witch said, and the pain behind her eyes sang to him. The White Witch hung back. She knew. She had eyes to see the void within him, where the Red Witch saw only skin over bones.

"Not safe anywhere," he said, and it came out a raspy croak because his throat was so tight with the effort of keeping in the dark. "I thought it would be him, with the moon in his hair. The thread to pull, the Tower struck by lightning." That was right, more than right; he'd seen it on the night the walls of the world came down, the vampire falling, falling, falling from the Dark Tower, setting even as the Slayer rose with the sun only to fall in her turn.

The Red Witch looked confused. Tanner felt a great need to explain to her--it wasn't out of malice, any of this, and it seemed important to let her know that. "He is a creature of evil. He's making the swing go too high." That hadn't come out right. She was still advancing on him, her movements slow and dreamy, steps in an unfamiliar dance. Tanner backed away. He couldn't just cut in. The world was all over strings, and how was he to know which was the right thread to tug on?

"Are you all right?" the Red Witch asked.

"I don't think so," he said, nervous. He backed up a few steps, reluctant to leave the path. The trees loomed up on either side, lithe, restless willows and hoary cypresses. Trees fit for a place of death. Lovely, dark and deep, lions and tigers and bears, oh my--could he drop a house on her, perhaps? He banged into something hard and cold, and looked up. The monument rose over him in the moonlight, stark, but not pure: the white marble was tarnished, stained with streaks of black and rust from decades of winter rains, the angel with the sword upraised in his defense.

"It's OK. Just come with us. We can take you--

"Willow, I think he's--"

The Red Witch reached for him, her pale hands glowing--moonlight, or something else? Words, what were the words? He couldn't do anything without the words! His hand shot out, fingers crooked, and grasped the cold marble shin of the statue. "Them bones, them bones, them dry bones," he choked out. Not what he wanted to say, not at all. "Gonna walk around, now hear the word of th-the... Lord of the Crossroads, hear me!" With shaking hands he pulled a bottle from his pocket, ancient little sample-sized bottle of Captain Morgan's Jim had found in a dumpster behind the liquor store last week, part of some junked advertising display. Lizzie'd wanted to drink it but he'd known it would come handy for more than a thimbleful of oblivion. He fumbled with the cap and it came off at last, releasing the heady odor of half-evaporated rum. "You thirsty, I give you drink." He splashed it out onto the grave-dirt at his feet and it soaked into the dry ground in seconds. He flung the bottle at the Witch, who yipped and hopped back.

"What are you doing?" she shouted.

Tanner ignored her, caught up in the mangled spell he was crafting. From another pocket he drew a cellophane packet of crumbling cheese crackers and ripped it open, scattering crumbs on the damp earth. "You hungry, I give you food. Come you now, Papa Ghede, take your horse and ride--"

"This was not the plan!" the eyeless man shouted, dancing on the grass. It died beneath his feet, leaving a trail of vegetative hieroglyphs behind him. The ground beneath Tanner's feet heaved, cracks appearing in the sod. A ghastly smell wafted upwards and Tanner's stomach revolted, though he had nothing to rid himself of and only bile burned its way up his throat and into his mouth. He knew, as the arm thrust its way up into the night air, that he'd made a mistake, but he couldn't think what it was he should have done. The ground buckled, and the earth cracked open with a sharp metallic retort like a steel girder snapping.

_You one crazy horse, boy_, a deep, inhuman voice said in his ears. _But no horse can carry two rider. Less you throw the one you got, I got to walk_ .

Tanner fell back on his ass, whimpering as the thing he'd called shambled up out of the stinking earth, tall and gaunt and grinning, trailing dirt from the ragged edges of its long black coat. Its eyes shone like polished obsidian beneath the brim of the battered top hat, and wads of cotton draggled out from its ears and nostrils--corpse-wrappings.

The Red Witch didn't back away. She stood her ground, shouting words Tanner'd known once, pulling moonlight from the air as the long black arm reached down for her. Magic crackled around her, arcing like tame lightning from finger to finger and lashing out at the looming figure overhead. Her eyes were black as night, black as the open grave, her clenched teeth white behind drawn lips, her hair leached of color under the pale moon but possessing still some quality of flame as it licked about her face. "Ignite!" she screamed as the hands came down to close about her, long fingers like the roots of trees entangling her in their grasp. The magic leaped up--

And the magic died away.

It fizzled out like cheap fireworks, leaving the witch small and scared and alone in front of the loa. Tanner, from his refuge at the feet of the stone angel, could see her eyes, normal now and gone wide and terrified with the sudden knowledge of her own vulnerability. Above Ghede's laughter he heard her shrill, desperate voice babbling the words to half a dozen spells. And there was no power behind it, none at all, and Ghede laughed. Laughed, and swung her about in a merry, obscene dance step, singing.

> Si koko te gen dan li tap manje mayi griye,  
> Se paske li pa gen dan ki fe l manje zozo kale!

"More rum!" The loa whirled his unwilling partner aside, almost carelessly, to turn his attention upon the White Witch.

"Tara!" the Red Witch screamed before all the air was driven from her body as she hit the ground. She rolled across the ravaged turf, a limp, helpless ball, to come to a halt against Tanner's monument, and lay there drawing in ragged painful breaths and clawing at the stone with both hands, trying to drag herself upright. "Tara," she sobbed, but whether the word was a cry for help or a wail of despair was impossible to say.

"Now!" the eyeless man howled. "Now, while you have the chance!"

Tanner crawled to his knees, the moonlight singing in his ears. The Red Witch lay splayed out on the grass before him, silver tear-tracks streaking her face. Power buzzed within him, tingling down his arms and through his fingers, his own slight talent and the cold oily tide of power surging over it. He remembered now. She was the one who'd shown him this spell was possible, on the night when the walls came down. "I'm sorry," he said earnestly. "I'm really sorry."

And said the right words, in the right order, as he plunged his fingers right into her skull.

*****

It was better to get it all out in the open, Buffy assured herself. Or most of it. Really. No more festering resentment. _Yep, now we have non-festering, out-of-the-closet resentment instead. Much better. _ She ducked under a low-hanging branch and touched the stake shoved into her belt briefly. She was too wrung out to be angry at this point; everything that was wrong with her life, starting with the fact that she was living it again, just kept trudging around and around in her brain, each worry biting at the tail of the one in front of it. She had to find a job. Was that fresh earth? Quick check... only gophers. Walk on. Without a degree she wasn't qualified for anything that paid decently. _Let's face it, not qualified for anything much but slaying vampires anyway, unless someone's in the market for a really violent aerobics instructor_. Willow was mad at her and jealous of Spike. She was mad at Willow, and... here she was, back from the dead for a month, walking through a graveyard at midnight, trying to come to terms with the fact that she felt most alive in the company of a dead man.

_I want him._

_Let's get that out of the way now, OK? I want Spike. I want to peel that stupid black shirt off like the skin off a grape. Want to lick him all over like a vampire popsicle. Want my hands on that body, want those hands on my body. Want that sweet, cruel, vulnerable, passionate mouth. Oh, **yeah**. Lips of Spike. Buffy **want** ._

Spike, lounging on the couch between her and Dawn and smiling at her sister with a wondering affection when he thought no one was looking. Spike, talking soaps with her mother over hot cocoa. Spike, huddled on the sarcophagus, whispering _I'd rather die_ through lips almost too bruised and swollen to speak. Spike, eyes alight over the fact that she'd read and liked some old poem. Spike, giving up his soul a second time for her sake, willing to let Willow's botched resurrection spell destroy him in order to save her. Spike, tossing off a snarky quip that left her snickering and trying oh-so-hard not to show it.

_Spike, fangs tearing into the throat of the guard who'd shot her, even as the chip shocked him half-senseless and all right, maybe that counted as self-defense but--Spike, licking blood from his lips with complacent satisfaction afterwards. Spike, not giving a single solitary damn whether the man had lived or died._

A tombstone cracked under the force of her kick. Buffy want was one thing. Buffy get was something else. Her eyes swept the rows of moonlit graves as she stalked along the cemetery fence, one with the shadows, searching for something she could take out all her frustration on, something she could hunt, something she could slay. _Irony sucks_. She'd forgiven Spike his trespasses, but she couldn't afford to forget them. He'd killed tens of thousands of people in his century-plus of existence, and for all the astonishing things he'd done in the past year, she still had no idea what would happen on the day that the chip in his skull ceased to function and he was once again free to attack humans. Sometimes she could believe that he felt something akin to regret for what he was, even if remorse for what he'd done was beyond him, but was that enough?

The scary thing was, the ethical tangle wasn't bothering her half as much as the emotional tangle--the fact that he was, potentially, a remorseless killer never left her thoughts, but it was taking a definite second place to the fact that he was Spike, and he loved her. She'd be the thing that gutter slime scraped off the bottom of its shoes if she took advantage of that love just to get her rocks off. She liked him too much to do that to him and how sick was it that she liked someone who was only a step or two away from seeing human beings as take-out, and if you liked someone and wanted them at the same time, was that love, and if so, why didn't it feel like either the swoony delirium she'd felt for Angel or the safe, comfortable thing she'd felt for Riley and why the HELL wasn't there anything for her to beat up tonight?

The scream caught her off-guard, but she was in motion before it died away. _About time_.

Buffy sped through the cemetery, ducking branches and dodging headstones as they loomed up out of the darkness. The noise had come from the eastern side of the lot, in the direction Willow and Tara had gone. There was very little Willow couldn't handle, and she was more worried that whatever it was would be reduced to its component molecules long before she got there than anything else. The run was exhilarating in itself, the steady rhythm of her breathing in counterpoint against her footfalls on the uneven ground. She heard another scream--definitely Willow--and a ghost of unease coalesced in her breast, pounding along with her heart.

Instead of dodging the next tombstone, she took it in stride, kicking off the top and leaping upwards to the roof of the nearest mausoleum. Dry leaves scattered beneath her feet as she landed on the summit. She straightened and shielded her eyes from the city glow and moonlight with one palm, surveying the panorama spread out on all sides, rank upon irregular rank of headstones meandering off into the darkness beneath the bordering willows.

The figure threading its way nimbly through the headstones was human, and wasn't--a young woman with long tawny hair who had to be Tara, but who moved as she'd never seen Tara moving, in a jerking, bawdy parody of a dance. She was singing in no language Buffy knew, though a few words here and there sounded vaguely French, pirouetting about a large marble statue. Two more dark figures crouched in the grass at its base. A shadow followed Tara as she moved, its movements her movements, its laughter her laughter, something larger than human and not quite _there_. Look straight on and there was nothing but Tara, but in the corners of her vision Buffy caught glimpses of a long black coat, a tall top hat, an ebony face that was somehow oddly familiar. Tara paused her dance as Buffy watched, looking up as if sensing her presence, and a huge grin split her face. "Hey now! I hungry, thirsty--you bring me rum, ti-blanc? You bring me cigars? Kill me a rooster?" The voice was deep and rich and inhuman and reminded her of... someone.

"Tara?" Buffy jumped down from the mausoleum and advanced on the other girl cautiously. "Tara, is that you?" Tara danced lightly away, a lascivious grin lighting her face.

"Oh ho, rooster's not the cock you want, hm?" She wiggled her hips suggestively. "You want advice, ti-blanc? You want luck? You want ask questions of Papa Ghede? You want this horse again? You follow the rules, you got to feed me. Bring me my rum, by damn!"

Buffy looked from Tara to the crumpled heap which was Willow and the cowering stranger beside her. She was at the statue in three furious strides, hauling the man up by his collar and shaking him. "What's wrong with her?" she yelled. "What did you do? Turn it off!"

"I--I--" the man stammered, clearly terrified. "She's being ridden by the loa. Ghede." Buffy stared at him. "I don't know how it happened!" he gasped. "I'm not... not that powerful. I didn't even invoke Legba to open the gates to the spirit world--this shouldn't have happened. Something called him here. Not me. Not me!"

He wouldn't look her in the eyes, and kept staring at his hands in horror and loathing--he was lying, she was sure about that, but how much and about what she had no idea. "Who's this Ghede when he's at home? Is he dangerous?"

The man's chin jerked up, and he looked at her as if she were insane. "Of course he's dangerous! But if you treat him right there's...You need to get some offerings. Food, candy, alcohol--not much, Ghede's a nasty drunk and you don't want to meet his Baron Samedi aspect--kill a chicken in his honor, something! Then he'll answer your questions and dismount. He knows everything the dead know. Otherwise--"

"What?"

The man swiped the lank dark hair from his forehead, shivering in her grasp. "I don't know. Ghede's not malevolent... usually. But he's unpredictable. He could ride her till she drops. He could get bored and leave. He could walk her in front of a bus. So you need to hurry--"

"Willow," Buffy interrupted. "How badly is she hurt?"

"Red Witch," the man whispered, his eyes going curiously blank. He shook himself. "I don't know. She fell."

Buffy stood there, rigid, then let go the stranger's collar. He fell back with a little yelp and sprawled in the grass. "Keep her here," she said, her voice as flat and deadly as she could make it. "I'll be right back."

It took five minutes, maybe, for her to race across the cemetery and bang perfunctorily on the door of Spike's crypt before kicking it in. She knew the moment she went in that he wasn't here; the electric sense of his presence was missing and the place felt empty. She began a methodical search of the upper level, and eventually found what she was looking for in a crate next to the mini-fridge--the bottles of Jack Daniels Spike had picked up at Willy's the previous night, still in their brown paper bags. After a moment's hesitation she grabbed one, tucked it under her arm, and tore out of the crypt at top speed.

When she got back to the angel monument, the strange man was gone, and Willow had pulled herself up to a sitting position and was leaning back against the pedestal of the statue, giggling at nothing, her eyes deep empty pools you could dive into and get lost in. No one else was in sight and for a cold horrid moment Buffy thought Tara was gone too.

"Boo!" Tara yelled in that not-Tara voice, jumping out from behind the statue.

Willow began clapping. "'Ray!" she cried. "Round and round and round and round!"

Buffy ripped the brown paper wrapper off the bottle and held it out. "Here! Here's your offering! Now get out of Tara and leave!"

The inhuman laughter rang out again. "How you think I appreciate a sacrifice, ti-blanc?" Tara's hand shot out and snatched the bottle. She worried the top off and tipped it back, swallowing greedily, with loud gulping and smacking noises. "Eeeeeeeeeeeeyah! It not rum, but it do." She twirled off into another dance step. "My houngan done run off, but he a sorry piece of shit anyway." Tara flopped to the ground cross-legged and took another swig of whiskey, grinning widely and running the tip of her tongue over her teeth, a strangely familiar gesture. "You got three questions, ti-blanc."

"The cat asked for a pair of russet leather boots," Willow informed her, her elfin face grave. Buffy shot an anguished look at Willow, then rounded on Tara-Ghede again.

"What's wrong with her?"

The bone-shivering chuckle again. "You already know the answer, ma petite. Her ti-bon-ange sicker than hell. She crazy."

How unfair was it that she couldn't punch that smug face in without hurting Tara? Buffy ground her teeth. "How can we fix what's wrong with her?"

"You can't. Last question, ti-blanc. Make it good."

Her mind went blank, and the world held still. _Ghede knows everything the dead know_.

"Can I trust Spike?"

Tara-Ghede threw back her head and laughed. "As much as you trust any man, and as little. You say frog, he jump. But you have to say frog."

"And what if I'm not around to say frog? What if I say frog and he decides I meant toad? What if--it's bad enough I've got to be the Slayer and Dawn's mom and the Summers' family breadwinner! I can't be Spike's conscience too!"

The dark, liquid eyes, full of wicked humor, blinked as the grin spread across Tara's face once more. "You got no choice there, ti-blanc. You already are." She squinted down the neck of the whiskey bottle. "I give you one piece free advice: you been asking the wrong questions. Not 'What's wrong with her,' but 'Why's it wrong?' Not 'How we fix her?' but 'How can she be fix?' And not 'Can I trust him?' but 'If he do whatever I want, what I want him to do?'"

"But--"

The bottle fell from Tara's hands as she keeled over sideways, limp as an abandoned puppet. It hit the grass and rolled, spraying pungent amber liquid in its wake. Willow started back with a wail of alarm, waving one hand blindly in Tara's direction. "No, no, Great Pan is dead!"

Buffy dove forward, ending up on her knees before Tara, clutching her shoulders with both hands. Tara moaned, leaning her forehead against Buffy's shoulder and holding her stomach with both hands--hopefully not in anticipation of a mini-Ghede bursting out of it, Buffy thought. Tara looked up, her face pale and glistening with sweat in the moonlight, though the night was getting chilly, and made a painful gulping noise. "Buffy?" Her voice was her own again, but she sounded weak and sick and very, very confused. "I think... I think I'm going to be..." And then she was, jackknifing forward as half a bottle of whiskey and whatever she'd had for dinner came up in one violent heave.

Willow started sobbing, crawling across the grass towards her lover. Buffy tried to simultaneously leap back out of the way and not let Tara fall, ending up in an awkward, arm's-length position of support. She began edging to one side, still on her knees. "Ew, ew, ew... Tara, it's OK, you just drank too much. Or he drank too much, or, or something. Willow--" Willow batted at Tara's shoulder with one hand and whimpered something about sugar cubes. Buffy freed one arm. "Sit down, please, I can't--"

"I'm OK," Tara croaked. "I think. I don't remember... there was this... this _thing_, this big, big thing... my head hurts." Her eyes widened. "Willow. Oh, gods, Willow--can you hear me?"

"In the dry times of year, in the leaves of regret, I know a hawk from a handsaw." Willow poked the remains of Tara's dinner with one finger and wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Stinky." She slumped, losing all interest in Tara, and began twisting a strand of her hair round her finger, tighter and tighter. Buffy sat back on her heels and pressed both hands to her forehead, feeling overwhelmed.

"We've got to get her somewhere safe," Tara said, hauling herself upright against the marble angel and getting unsteadily to her feet. She held out a trembling hand to her partner. "Willow... come on, Willow..." Her voice broke. Not all of the moisture on her cheeks was sweat. "You're going to be OK, honey, we'll find some way to make you better, just like you made me better..." She looked over at Buffy, her eyes all to human now, and full of agony. "What are we going to do?"

Buffy ran a hand down her face. "Um. Crypt. It's not far to Spike's crypt. He wasn't there when I went to get the whiskey... oh, fabulous, we managed to kill the whole bottle. Somehow I think 'I had to give it to a raunchy cemetery god' isn't going to make him very happy." She got up, avoiding the aftermath of Tara's sick fit, and picked Willow up bodily. "OK. No panicking. If whatever happened to her is what happened to Willy, it'll wear off." _I hope._ "We go to the crypt. We clean up as much as we can. We keep an eye on Willow. What did happen to her?"

Tara hugged herself tightly for a moment, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut against the sight of Willow's slack face. Then she sighed and looked up, retreating into her shell of calm reserve. "I'm not sure. We were patrolling, and we heard that guy coming. He seemed really out of it. Willow tried to talk him into letting us take him out of the cemetery, and he... called something. Some kind of power. Willow tried to fight it, and then it just... I can't remember anything after that."

"He called it Ghede."

Tara frowned. "Ghede? That's familiar... oh! I remember! We had that in my Cultural Anthropology course last semester. It's Haitian. He's one of the Rada loa, a pretty important one, I think. Guardian of the cemetery. He's also, um, associated with sex."

Buffy rolled her eyes. "Great, like I need sex and death tied up in my subconscious any more than they already are."

"I don't know much more than that about it. Voudoun's way out of my field. I always thought it was a weird combo in class," Tara mused. "On one hand he's this dangerous scary death guy you go to for advice, and on the other he's this chaotic trickster who likes to smoke and drink and make lewd jokes and have a good time. And he's a protector of children."

Buffy shrugged. "Doesn't sound all that weird to me. Though he gives sucky advice. No way worth half a bottle of bourbon."

Tara stroked Willow's forehead. After a while she said thoughtfully, "No, I guess it wouldn't seem weird, to you."

Buffy still hadn't figured out what Tara meant by that by the time they reached the crypt.


	8. Chapter 8

_Dozy little bints_, Spike thought as he followed Xander away from the car. If he hadn't had to ferry Dawn"s annoying friends home, they wouldn't have passed the park. If they hadn't passed the park, they wouldn't have run into this larger but equally dozy bint, and he wouldn't be tramping after Harris on a mission of mercy. Whatever was menacing her chum had bloody well better be something he could sink his teeth into, metaphorically speaking. If it turned out to be human and he had to sit back and watch Harris play Sir Galahad he was going to lose his lunch.

He glanced back; Dawn's pale, resolute face watched him over the top of the front door window. Lisa, in the back seat, was also watching, but her expression was far from resolute, and she quickly rolled the window up when she saw him turn. He snorted. Scared. Of him. Not of Dawn"s calibre, that one. The Bit had never been afraid of him, not from the first brief glimpse they'd gotten of one another the night he'd come to offer Buffy an alliance against Angelus. Still, it had been a long time since anyone human had been terrified of him, and it felt... good. Gratifying. Not that he was going to do anything about it... not that he _could_ do anything about it... but... there were times when the smell of fear was wonderfully nostalgic. Megan, on the other hand... just too dim to be frightened. Spike drifted off into a pleasant daydream about draining Megan to the point where she was too weak to give voice to that immensely grating giggle.

Weatherly Park bordered on state land, and in places where the fences hadn't been kept up, it was possible to wander into moderately wild terrain--though not, as made plain by the litter of cigarette butts and the occasional crushed beer can, to escape evidence of human occupation. They'd been walking for a good five minutes and were well into the trees, a grove of huge old magnolias with limbs bent nearly to the ground in places. Moonlight poured through the dark leaves and ran along the branches like molten silver, dripping down to gather in cold pools at their feet. The woman led them out of the grove and through a ragged wall of oleander and pyracantha heavy with clusters of half-ripe berries. The hem of Spike"s duster caught on a branch, bringing him back to the here and now. He yanked it free with a muttered curse.

He might be a complete git most of the time, but Harris had the right idea about avoiding the great outdoors. Vampires were creatures of civilization by necessity, but Spike objected to the great outdoors on principle. He'd been born in an era where the only sensible thing to do to a wilderness was tame it. In life he'd had harbored a romantic's fascination with the untamed variety, but that hadn't survived his first few post-mortem encounters with the real thing.

"Just how far away is your friend?" Xander asked, batting aside a branch with the butt of his axe. The woman quivered at the sound of his voice and stopped, pointing.

"Through there," she whispered, pointing to a gap in the bushes.

Through the thorny sprays of pyracantha a clearing with a picnic table was visible. Several dark figures clustered around it, and the sound of chanting rose on the night air. Spike wove his way through the pyracantha, cursing the thorns under his breath, and peered around Xander's shoulder. He heard the woman moving behind them, and didn't think anything of it. At least, not until he heard the faint whistle of something heavy slicing through the air. He turned in time to see a length of cloth-wrapped lead pipe smack into Xander's dark head just behind the ear in as expert a coshing as he'd ever been privileged to witness. Xander's knees buckled and he fell heavily to the ground, dropping the axe. "Bloody--you daft bitch, what--"

The woman swung at him and Spike dodged--or tried to; his duster had snagged very thoroughly on the pyracantha when he'd turned. There were downsides to all that dramatic flaring. The pipe grazed the top of his head, sending a shower of vermillion sparks across his field of vision. He staggered, grabbing the branches around him for support and coming up with a handful of thorns. Ignoring the pain in his lacerated palms he hauled himself up, snarling. The woman swung again, all technique gone, just pure desperate panic left. Spike struggled to free himself of his coat. The pipe clipped him in the head again, barely missing the thin bone over the temples. He ripped his left arm from the entangled duster with a yell of agony and launched a furious swing at his attacker.

He felt his fist smash into her cheek and the satisfying crunch of bone breaking. Even as she crumpled, electrical retribution from the chip arced through his skull, turning everything to light, to pain, and Spike collapsed into the thorny embrace of the pyracantha, more than usually dead to the world.

*****

There was a unique flavor of panic associated with being a vampire and waking up to find yourself restrained outdoors on the wrong side of midnight. Spike lunged to his feet, was brought up short by a double jolt of pain in his hands and shoulders, and fell back into the lamp post he was tied to with a grunt. The back of his head slammed into the metal post and the impact woke the sharp hot pain of the knots left by the pipe. It wrestled for dominance with the dull, general ache of residual chip-shock, and won out for the moment, but neither one was down for the count.

Spike made himself stop panting and sat there taking inventory, not daring to shake his head lest something come loose. The yellow glow overhead was the lamp, not the sun, and the brightness of the little clearing was due to the full moon which was still shining over the tops of the trees to the west. It was late November, nights were long, and it was still hours to sunrise. He wasn't on fire. No broken bones. He could smell blood, mostly his own, but it wasn't much and mostly dried. The worst of the pyracantha scratches still stung, but most of them seemed to have healed already. Unfortunately the same couldn't be said for his head.

He heard a muffled groan behind him. "Harris."

A beat. "Yeah?"

He didn't sound good. God knew he didn't have much of a brain to bash in, but there were limits to everything, even Harris's apparently infinite capacity for absorbing blows to the head. 'do me a favor."

A strangled snort, and the sound of futile thrashing. An elbow jabbed him in the back. "Kind of tied up at the moment, Spike."

"Next time some daft bint swans in out of nowhere wanting a John bloody Wayne impersonation, go with the impulse that says r16;Sod off"."

"Yeah, like you were Mr. Suspicion." Another bout of thrashing, accomplishing nothing. "Damn," Xander breathed, slumping back against the pole.

Spike wiggled his fingers experimentally. His arms had been pulled behind his back around the lamp post, and his thumbs were lashed together--wire, not rope. From what he could feel, Xander'd been given similar treatment. He could pick at the loops of wire with his index and middle fingers, but he couldn't get a grip at all, and the tightness with which the loops had been twisted meant there was a very real possibility that too-severe struggles could result in the loss of a digit. If he'd had any circulation his thumbs would have gone numb by now. Spike pondered the question of whether lost body parts would conveniently regenerate, or if he'd have to hunt a severed thumb down and stick it back on somehow before vampiric healing kicked in. He'd had minions injured that severely once or twice, back in the days when he'd had minions, but unfortunately for the cause of medical inquiry, at the time he'd had no interest in letting them laze around while they healed--not when it was so much faster to rip their heads off and make new ones. _Wages of impatience, William old boy_.

A strange woman in a faded sun dress trotted past, carrying a pile of white stones in her skirt--palm-sized fragments of crushed quartz from someone's landscaping, it looked like. Spike growled at her and wished that tearing off a few heads was still one of his options. The woman detoured well around their lamp post and joined the rest of their captors. She let go her skirt-tails and poured the rocks out on the ground, where half-a-dozen hands snatched them up and began adding them to the... assemblage.

It was centered around the picnic table. Not one of the new, UV resistant plastic ones in red and blue and yellow to be found in the main picnic area towards the front gates of the park; this was an old one, poured concrete layered with decades" accumulation of Parks and Recreation Department paint. The last layer applied had been forest green, but it looked black in the lamplight, with leprous patches of fire-engine red showing through where it had peeled back from the layer underneath. All around the table the landscaping quartz had been laid out in lines and curlicues, intersecting at crazy angles. Random objects were scattered throughout the white quartz maze--Pepsi cans, a mangled Barbie doll, a bundle of used ballpoint pens tied together with dirty pink ribbon. A scatter of devotional candles in cheap glass holders clustered on the benches to either side of the weird suburban altar. A thin middle-aged man in a grimy yellow nylon weatherbreaker was carefully drawing a series of symbols on the table with chalk.

The people working on the construction of the thing were as random as the objects that made it up. Men and women both, ranging from college-age to their mid-fifties, with pinched tired faces and hopeless eyes, working with an eerie, implacable concentration. The presence of their captives seemed to make them nervous; their eyes slid over and around the lamp post and when they had to pass by they did so at the greatest distance possible. They worked without speaking, each seeming to know his or her part by instinct. Only the woman who'd led them here sat apart, huddled beside one of the benches, whimpering softly and now and then poking tentative fingers at her bruised and swollen cheek.

"There's something disturbingly familiar about all this."

Spike grunted. "Don't fancy hanging about to let it get more so. Your hands are above mine--I can't stand up till you do."

By bracing themselves against the pole and each other's shoulders, they managed to push themselves upright. "Right," Xander gasped. "We"re vertical. Now we put stage two of my brilliant escape plan into action."

"And that would be?"

"Pliers. They tied us up with wire, someone's got to have pliers. We lure them over here, and--"

"Kick them to death? That is brilliant, except for the part where I collapse in a government-sponsored seizure and you saw my hand off trying to close the snips."

"Well, if you don't like that one, we can go to plan B." Xander threw back his head and bellowed "HEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLP!" Spike looked at him sourly over his shoulder. "You got a better idea, fang-face, I"m listening."

The man in the yellow windbreaker threw down his chalk and scuttled over to them, waving his hands and making shushing gestures. He bobbed up and down, his balding head gleaming in the lamplight, shaking a finger at them furiously and then going into something that looked like a goldfish impression, but before Spike could decide if kicking the legs out from under him was worth the shock, he caught the sound of approaching footsteps. Too heavy to be Buffy or Will. Not that Will might not enjoy watching him turned into cutlets, the mood she was in lately.

A moment later the man in the windbreaker heard the noise too and broke into a flurry of gestures and twitches, contorting his body extravagantly as the runner burst into the clearing. The newcomer staggered to a halt, looking like he'd just outrun the devil himself, and bent over with hands on knees to try to catch his breath. Non-descript, middle-aged, greying dark hair lank with neglect... "Bugger me sideways with a shrimp fork," Spike muttered. "That's the bloke who disappeared from the loo."

Xander craned his neck to get a better look. "Who?"

"The other night. Couple of wankers chased their dinner into the pool house whilst I was in there mindin" my own business, and I had to teach 'em some manners. When I was done the dinner'd scarpered, and I'd swear on my mum's grave he didn't go past me. All that arsing about with Willy knocked it out of my head."

The others had left their tasks and joined the man in the windbreaker in clustering around the newcomer, touching his face, patting his shoulders as if to reassure themselves he was real. "Tanner, Tanner." One of them tugged on the man's coat sleeves, pointing to the woman who'd lured them here.

The man--Tanner?--glanced over at the altar. "Fuck," he muttered. "Lizzie!" He was at the woman's side in a handful of long strides, and knelt beside her, cradling her face in his hands with impersonal tenderness. He looked up, back over at the others. "Jim, Ramon--what happened to her?"

Windbreaker Man pointed mutely at Spike. Another man, younger, larger, Hispanic, wearing a Dodgers T-shirt, mumbled, "Lizzie Borden took an axe, but the dead travel fast."

Spike's lip curled. "Not fast enough, apparently."

Tanner rose and walked over to look the two of them up and down, an inscrutable expression on his lined face. "I can't get away from you people tonight."

"Look, mate, sorry about your girlfriend's good looks, but she did a number on us first. I did you a good turn the other night; return the favor and we"ll call it even."

Tanner folded his arms and stood there staring at them, head to one side. The lamplight pooling in his dark eyes illumined no triumph. He sighed. "I wish I could. I didn't ask for any of this, you know?" He waved a hand around the clearing, taking in the altar, the little huddle of people behind him, the prisoners in front of him. "But here I am anyway, and... I have to take care of them. I"m doing it the only way I know how." He turned to the man in the Dodgers shirt. "Ramon, untie the little guy. We"ll do him first."

Ramon jogged off to the edge of the clearing and began rummaging through a bag of supplies. He came up with Xander's prophesied pair of pliers and started back, making snik-snik noises playing with them. Spike pressed warily back against the lamp post. Tanner didn't seem to have any weapons on him, unless he meant to go get the lead pipe and start a game of vampire pinata, but Spike knew first-hand about the creative things one could get up to with the contents of the common toolbox, and pliers were among the most useful of the lot. _In for another bout of poetic justice, are we? Bloody wonderful._

"It probably won't do much good to explain all this to you," Tanner said, taking off his coat and folding it carefully in quarters. He laid it on the grass beside the picnic table and began rolling up his sleeves. "But I do it anyway. Seems the right thing. I can't tell you if you"ll remember any of it later. Some do." He bent down and extracted a couple of pens from the pink-ribboned bundle, pulled a rubber band out of his trousers pocket and began lashing them together. "You"ve probably noticed that most of us have a few problems... relating to reality." A rueful smile crossed his face. "I can fix that. For awhile. Just for me, in which case you'd recover. Or for everyone. In which case..." He looked genuinely regretful. "You won't."

Xander went stiff with shock. "You"re Glory's band of crazies!"

Ramon trotted up with the pliers, which looked positively friendly and welcoming compared to what Tanner was putting together. Tanner motioned him to wait, and stepped forward, holding up his makeshift cross. "Some of us were. Now... we"re family." Spike pulled away, sliding down the lamp post in an effort to avoid contact, but his bound hands prevented escape. His head jerked back as acid fire branded his brow and cheek. "Untie him, fast," Tanner snapped, and Ramon clamped the nose of the pliers on the wire around Spike's hands and began undoing the twist. Spike bit his tongue to keep from screaming at the incipient agony half an inch from his eyes. Ramon hauled him to his feet and dragged him away from the lamp post, and Tanner backed along with them, keeping the cross near enough his skin to raise a welt. "I will take care of you when this is over," Tanner said. "I want you to understand that. You"re giving us a great gift, and that makes you our - my - responsibility."

"That makes me feel just ducky. Unfortunately, I"ve got special needs you may not be aware of." Spike hooked a foot around Ramon's ankle and threw his weight sideways, quelling a whoop of triumph when the chip didn't give him more than a minor buzz. Ramon dropped the pliers and staggered under the impact, but unfortunately he had a good fifty pounds on Spike and kept his feet. Spike kicked the pliers wildly in the general direction of the lamp post before Windbreaker Guy and Tanner pounced him. The three of them wrestled him onto the picnic table while Spike twisted in their grasp like a cornered wildcat, unable to land any effective blows without shocking himself.

The three men slammed him into the concrete of the table with desperate strength and Spike heaved upwards against their hands, the muscles in his neck and shoulders corded with the strain. "Hold him down!" Tanner gasped, and another three or four pairs of hands grabbed his legs and arms. The vampire snarled up at the circle of frightened, confused faces hovering over him, morphing into game face and snapping at the nearest set of fingers. The elderly man and the thin, wispy woman in the sun dress cried out and cringed away, but they were back a moment later at Tanner's urgings. There were things on the streets of Sunnydale a hell of a lot scarier than a neutered vampire, and this lot had probably seen most of them. Spike jerked violently back and forth as Tanner began a staccato chant and his hands descended towards the crown of the vampire's head, fingers spread.

"Couldn't we maybe get you a gift certificate to Chuck E. Cheese instead?" Xander shouted over at them. "Honestly, sucking my brain won't do you any good. Ask anyone. Bottom of my class and proud of it, and Spike, well, he's--"

_He's a vampire. Lesson number one, vampire equals impure. You can't even..._

Spike gave up his struggle and fell back onto the concrete slab, relaxing so completely that several of the people holding him toppled forward onto the table. Saffron melted into blue as his eyes met Tanner's brown ones.

For a moment Tanner looked uncertain. Then he drove his fingers into Spike's skull.

*****

"Are you sure you"re doing it right?" Lisa asked for the third time.

"Yes, I"m sure!" Dawn turned the key in the ignition again and silently cursed the DeSoto's freaky push-button transmission--why couldn't Spike have a normal car? The asthmatic rasp of the engine cranking, sputtering, and failing to turn over resumed. She turned the ignition off and sat back, pressing her fists to her temples and trying to think. Despite the trashy appearance of the interior, Spike doted on the black monster, and kept the engine in good running order--partly normal guy-type car obsessiveness, and partly vampire necessity; Spike took his unlife into his hands every time he took a cross-country trip in daylight, and absolutely couldn't afford unexpected breakdowns. So it was unlikely that the starter or the battery was going out. The gas gauge was low, but not yet on empty--maybe the gauge was off, though, old cars could be finicky that way, and in taking them back to Lisa's place, Spike had done more driving tonight than he'd originally intended. Or maybe she'd flooded the engine, in which case all she could do was sit here and wait for it to unflood.

"I know, we could play a game!" Megan said. "Do you guys know Twenty Questions?"

"It's a breadbox," Lisa muttered. At Megan's hurt look, she added, "Duh. With you it's _always_ a breadbox."

"Would you guys just shut up?" Dawn gripped the steering wheel and tried to stifle the wholly inappropriate yawn that engulfed her. Since school had started Buffy had made her abandon the largely nocturnal schedule she'd kept over the summer, and she wasn't used to staying up half the night anymore. She rolled down her window again and peered worriedly out into the dark.

"Heeeeeeellllp!"

"What was that?"

"What was what?" Lisa looked around, hugging herself. Dawn was already getting out of the car.

"That was Xander!"

"We"re supposed to go get your sister!" Lisa hollered after her.

The DeSoto's trunk was large enough to hide a couple of bodies, and had served just that purpose on numerous occasions. Dawn shoved the cooler and the grocery bags aside and began dragging out weapons, searching for something light enough for her to carry. Buffy and Spike made swinging five-to-ten-pound hunks of steel around look like nothing at all, but Dawn knew from certain past experiments of her own that it was a lot harder than it looked. She settled on a thing with a wickedly curved blade which was either a puny sword or an overgrown knife, and slammed the trunk shut. "There's no time to get my sister!" she shot back at Lisa, grabbing her sweater from the front seat. "Are you coming or not?"

In the darkness of the back seat Lisa looked awful, her complexion like milk about to go bad. It was weird; Dawn was used to thinking of herself as the scaredy one, the tagalong. Was this how it had started for Buffy, six years ago? Just realizing that something had to be done, and you were the only one who could do it? Lisa was looking at her with something like... "Sure."

"Me too!" Megan said. "You"re not, like, leaving me here alone to get chewed on by vampires. At least, not of the non-sexy variety."

"That's beyond gross and into grotty." Dawn shaded her eyes against the moonlight and tried to remember exactly which pair of trees Spike and Xander had disappeared between.

Megan giggled. "Oh, come on, don't tell me you never thought about it."

Dawn did a very creditable imitation of Spike's trademark disbelieving snort. "You live through three months of Angelus on the rampage and see if you find anything sexy about it." She slung the sword-knife over one shoulder, picked the likeliest pair of trees and set off at a brisk walk. "Let's go."

It was easy enough to say that, easy enough to set off with a determined look, but once into the trees it was impossible to tell which way her quarry had gone. "What if they come back to the car and we"re gone?" Lisa asked, fifteen minutes later--fifteen minutes of wandering around the picnic area, peering through hedges, and jumping at shadows. "One of us should have stayed there."

That it was a reasonable objection made it all the more annoying. Dawn scowled and kept walking. "Go on back, then. I"ll give you the keys." Lisa didn't answer, but her eyes darted from shadow to shadow and she edged a little closer to Megan. Dawn pulled her sweater tighter. It was the coldest part of the night--it must be in the fifties, and Dawn, Southern California born and bred, was convinced she was freezing. At least walking kept her warmer than sitting.

"Why don't we just yell for them?" Megan asked as they passed another deserted picnic table--the ominous lump beneath it had turned out to be a homeless guy who was _probably_ just asleep. Dawn headed back towards the trees .

"Because then whoever's got them will know we"re coming! Haven't you ever rescued anyone before?" Megan and Lisa shook their heads, duly impressed with her expertise--no reason to clue them in that most of her experience consisted of being the rescuee rather than the rescuer. Of course they were going to be majorly unimpressed soon if she kept trekking aimlessly around the park. She bit her lower lip. "Both of you be real quiet for a minute. See if we can hear anything weird."

"We won't--"

"Just do it, okay?" Dawn closed her eyes and concentrated. It was freaky how much you could hear when you paid attention. The hiss of your own breath, the rustle of your own clothes. The soft rush of wind through the upper branches of the trees and the distant roar of traffic on the highway. Sirens. A helicopter. A mockingbird running through its repetoire. Dogs barking. And... voices, very distant, very faint. If Spike were here, he probably could have told her what they were saying, but if Spike were here she wouldn't be hunting him. It was very difficult to tell what direction they were coming from, but... "This way."

Xander lay flat on his back, arms pulled taut over his head, one leg stretched out as far as it would go. His shirt had pulled out of the waistband of his levis and hiked up around his middle. Half a dozen rocks in various sizes and degrees of sharpness were digging into his shoulderblades, and his breath was coming in harsh grunts of effort. The toe of his sneaker was only an inch or two away from the edge of the concrete path where the pliers lay.

There they were, half-open, taunting him with their nearness. Why the bleeping freck couldn't Spike have kicked a little bit harder? Xander dug his other heel into the hard-packed earth and pulled himself further away from the post, gritting his teeth against the pain in his hands. He couldn't feel his thumbs at all anymore, so how exactly he was going to use the pliers if he got hold of them was a bit of a problem, but... one thing at a time. Just one... more... inch...

"Xander!"

He froze, then slowly turned his head. Ten feet away a ragged wall of oleander rose into the moonlit sky. At the base of the hedge the foliage rustled, a pair of hands parted the branches, and Dawn's face, flanked by Lisa's and Megan's, appeared in the gap, framed in dark narrow leaves. "Blossom! Bubbles! Buttercup! I"m saved! I thought we told you to stay in the car?"

Dawn's cheeks flushed. "If you"re gonna be like that I will go back to the car."

Xander dug in his heels again and shoved himself back towards the post. A quick look over at the picnic table altar told him that the crazies were well occupied trying to keep Spike on the table. "Just get those pliers and get me off this crazy thing."

*****

The vampire's body went rigid as Tanner's fingers brushed his temples and sank ever so slightly into the skull. Instead of sinking all the way in, his probing fingers glanced away, repelled by a surface that was slick, cold... dead. Recoiling, Tanner pulled away, almost ready to abandon the attempt then and there. But no--Ronnie and the Rabbit Guy and Denise and the others, they were depending on this, even though they didn't realize it. He steeled himself, studying his prey as he hadn't done since the first desperate days after _She_ had disappeared and he'd put the spell together out of baling wire and hope.

The brain, the body in front of him weren't alive--but they weren't really dead, either. The electrochemical reactions of a living body were replaced or augmented by demonic life-force, stoking the cellular furnaces with a cold, eldritch fire. Breathing was a wholly voluntary affair, the heart did not beat, and only the friction of its own movements kept this creature a few degrees above ambient temperature. But this body still knew pain and hunger and pleasure, this brain still had thoughts and feelings, no matter that they were stored in patterns of magic instead of electrical waves, and if only he could change the angle of approach, slide in from a different direction... Tanner's fingers sank into the skull further, slowly, reluctantly, and only with great effort.

The vampire tasted of love and rage and poetry, blood and steel and death and moonlight, man's mind and demon's soul inextricably entwined, a creature of air and darkness, and there was nothing there that Tanner could grasp that would not burn his hands to the bone in the grasping. The pale, ostensibly human face looked up at him, and smiled. "So the hellbitch that made you was right about something. Not to your taste, mate?"

Tanner broke away, his skin crawling. He flexed his fingers, sickened, and not entirely by the vampire. How different were they, really, save in what they stripped from their victims? "This won't work. Get the other one."

He probably should have kept himself from tensing as Ramon and Jim looked from Tanner towards the lamp post, should have remained impassive as they saw that the lamp post now stood bare and alone in the center of its own spotlight--should have refrained from doing anything that might draw any attention to Xander, who'd come up behind Tanner and was raising the the lead pipe over his head.

Sod that; he'd never been any good at impassive. A feral grin burst across Spike's face as the pipe came down. Tanner's eyes rolled back--not as damaging a blow as it could have been, since Xander's wounded hands could barely keep their grip on the pipe, but as Spike could attest, even inexpertly wielded it was one hell of a distraction. The hands restraining him momentarily loosened their grips in surprise, and he surged up off the table in a black-and-ivory blur and broke for freedom. He hit the ground rolling, bounced to his feet and spun round to see Xander chuck the pipe at Ramon. His head was still aching, but the rush of fight or flight shoved the pain to the back of his consciousness. His eyes met Xander's, and the grin widened. "Better part of valor, or do you want to work off some more frustration?"

Xander looked at Ramon, whom the pipe had missed by a mile. "If that means run like hell, let's do--hey! Running away is in the other direction!"

"And my coat's in this one. I"m not leaving it for the Salvation Army brigade. Run, you nit--they can't do a damned thing to me; it's your brain they want to make chowder of!"

Spike dodged Jim and the elderly man whose name had never come up and sped off across the clearing towards the pyracantha bushes. Sure enough, his duster was still tangled in the branches like a shabby black leather bat, and Xander's axe was still lying on the ground where he's dropped it. Spike snatched up the axe and gave his coat a yank, wincing as he felt the thirty-year-old leather tear. Well, he could get it repaired; it had seen worse over the decades. Coat in one hand and axe in the other, he turned on his heel and raced after Xander, drawing breath for a victory yell--and catching the scent of Dawn and her friends as he did so.

"Niblet, you"re bloody well going to be deader than I am when I catch you!" he roared. Tanner and the woman whose jaw he'd broken were still slumped beside the picnic table, but the rest of the crazies had taken off after Xander, and, whether they realized it yet, Dawn as well. Which meant that he was due for a few more run-ins with his electrical nemesis before the night was over. Spike plunged through the barrier of oleanders and began to run in earnest, feet barely skimming the ground. Patrolling with the others he rarely got the chance to go all out, and it was exhilarating to exert himself to the fullest again. Over the pounding of his own footsteps he heard the noise of people crashing through the brush ahead, drawing closer with every stride, and caught the heady scent of human sweat, redolent of fear and exhaustion.

A piercing shriek split the night ahead of him. Spike's eyes flared yellow and an anticipatory growl ripped itself from his throat. The moon was sinking behind the trees now, but his eyes could pierce the blackness of a coal mine as readily as the brightest of noons, and there was nothing between him and the hulking figure ahead but time and distance, and he was rapidly closing both. He inhaled sharply--

Not Dawn.

He checked himself in mid-leap, twisting aside and landing crouched catlike in front of Ramon, who had Lisa tucked securely under one meaty arm. She saw him loom up out of the night and whimpered, clawing uselessly at the hand over her mouth, her eyes liquid with terror.

He could hear the retreating footsteps of the others ahead of them; by the looks of it, Lisa hadn't had a chance to cry out. For a second he seriously considered leaving her behind; he'd have gladly shocked his brain to jelly for Dawn's sake, but Lisa was no one in particular to him, and he'd had enough, the last few days, of helping the helpless and having said helpless promptly turn around and apply boot leather to his arse. Buffy might get off on the whole sacred duty thing, but he didn't, and if he took off now none of them would ever know...

...until Dawn asked what had become of Lisa, and he couldn't lie to her or her bleeding sister for sod all. Bloody hell.

The whole internal debate had taken place in the space of one of his nonexistent heartbeats. Spike dropped his coat and the axe and sprang hard and fast from his crouch, tackling Ramon low around the knees, using Lisa's weight along with his own--none of the crazies seemed to have any real skill at brawling; it was only their numbers and the fact that he couldn't hit back which made them dangerous. He grunted as another shock hit him--after all this time you'd think he'd get used to them, but no such luck; maybe a human's pain centers would have burned out by now, but hip hooray for vampire healing abilities; _his_ was in perfect working order. Ramon went down this time, skidding through the dead leaves and letting go of Lisa as he fell. Spike rolled off the larger man, swearing steadily, and staggered to his feet. Christ, but his head hurt.

Lisa, still huddled on the damp ground where she'd fallen, stared up at him, trembling. Fuck, he was still all fangy; the chit was going to wet herself. Spike shifted back, reached down and grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. Lisa looked from him down to the fallen Ramon, who was wheezing and trying to get the air back into his lungs, and back to Spike.

And grabbed him round with waist with an incoherent sob, and hugged him, hard, before Spike had time to feel anything except shock.

His hands hovered over her shoulders, uncertain. He didn't touch. Not humans. Not anyone. Not anymore, not outside a fight. Not that he didn't want to. He'd always been a tactile person. But why torture himself by sidling up to all that lovely, warm, forbidden flesh? Dawn, yes. He'd gotten accustomed to Dawn's presence and her complete comfort in his, and the awkward, brotherly hugs and pats on the shoulder between them had been a large part of keeping him sane over the long summer--and maybe her too. But this--Lisa was anything but comfortable; the scent of her terror combined with the pounding of her pulse made his fangs ache to extend.

"Thank you," she whispered, and released him.

Spike stared down at her for a long moment, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, as if to wipe away some invisible stain. He stalked over and snatched up his much-abused duster once more, picked up the axe, and thrust it at her handle first. "Here, make yourself useful and carry this. Let's go." Without sparing Lisa a further glance, he took off towards his car, not bothering to see if she followed.


	9. Chapter 9

Dawn detoured around a tombstone and shifted the bag of groceries from one hip to the other. "You could have left me off at Lisa's." Lisa and Megan had agreed eagerly that it wasn't necessary to burden Lisa's mom with excess information about their night out, and had agreed somewhat more reluctantly to tell Lisa's mother that Dawn had gotten sick and gone home early--Megan obviously suspected the two of them of being off to have further adventures of which she was being left out.

Spike took a final drag off his cigarette and sent the butt spinning into the night. "Could've. Didn't."

Dawn shot him a sideways look under her lashes. Something had unnerved him there at the end, as they'd escaped the park; he was stalking along, head down, duster flapping behind him, doing the 'I'm a predatory creature of the night and don't you forget it!' thing big time--a difficult effect to achieve while carrying a styrofoam cooler under one arm, even if it was full of pig's blood, but Spike had had a lot of practice. "I thought we weren't going to add to my sister's worries."

"That," Spike said, "was before you left the car." He looked down at her and his voice softened. "Not that we didn't appreciate the hand, Bit, but if anything'd gone wrong you could have ended up roughly as bright as Harris. Your chums--they had no idea what they were getting into, did they? Not the best choice for backup, pet. For bloody stupid planning I'm bound to make you suffer, and I can't think of anything calculated to cause more suffering than forcing you to endure your sister's company when she's good and brassed off."

Dawn punched him in the arm. "You really are evil." She stuck her lower lip out and added in lower but still perfectly audible to vampires tones, "And if you think enduring Buffy's presence is a good punishment for stupid plans, no wonder you come up with so many of them."

He chuckled, his mercurial spirits on the upswing again. "Pet, I still don't buy that you could spot a kukri knife in a dark boot and completely miss the full can of petrol right beside it."

"I told you, it was behind the cooler!" She wasn't going to live that one down for quite awhile. "Anyway, it's not my fault you drive a car that gets, like, three miles to the gallon."

Spike looked wounded. "Twelve, I'll have you know!" As they approached the crypt he stopped in the middle of the path, frowning, and put a restraining hand on Dawn's shoulder. "Half a mo'. We've got company."

Dawn looked ahead. Tawny golden light poured out through the windows of the crypt--someone had lit the candles, which meant that the visitor was either human or some other kind of demon--vampires wouldn't have needed the light. A darker shape moved behind the iron crossbars of the window. Spike pulled Dawn off the path and into the shadow of a nearby elm. "See if you can stay put this time."

He glided off towards the crypt, a shadow among shadows, all business now and infinitely more dangerous-looking for it. Dawn set her bag down and folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her sweater against the chill. With all that had gone on already tonight, she was far more on edge than she liked to admit, and letting Spike out of her sight was the last thing she wanted to do. She stood on tip-toe, trying to see what was going on inside, but the angle was wrong and the candlelight too diffuse to make anything out.

It was with great relief that she saw the vampire's pale head re-appear in the crypt doorway. "All clear, pet. It's just your sis."

"Oh, great. I was hoping it was only a flesh-eating demon."

When Dawn entered the crypt Buffy was hovering beside the stairwell to the crypt's lower level, arms folded, head down, carefully not looking at Spike. Spike was setting the cooler down by the refrigerator, carefully not looking at Buffy. Dawn expected her sister to go into lecture mode immediately, but to her surprise Buffy just acknowledged her presence with a nod.

"I put her in your bed," Buffy said. "I hope that's OK. Tara's down there with her now."

"Yeh, no problem." Spike ran a hand through his hair and bent to fiddle with the lid of the cooler. "Still housebroken, isn't she?"

The two of them were not looking at each other so hard Dawn wouldn't have been surprised to see scorch marks in the air between them. Ooh, this was new. Dawn tried not to stare too obviously as she set the grocery bag down on top of the mini-fridge and began pulling things out. Buffy'd said they'd had a fight. What kind of fight left you acting like that? Buffy'd always claimed that Spike considered a punch in the nose third base. "Her? Her who? What's wrong?"

"Willow," Buffy said, her voice flat. "She's--last night, we found Willy the Snitch wandering around in the middle of the highway, acting like one of Glory's crazies. Tonight Willow ran into the guy that did it. At least I hope so--I'd hate to think there were two of them running around. Willow has left the building, sanity-wise."

Spike abandoned the no-eye-contact game and looked right at her, startled. "Would the bloke she ran into be a skinny dark-haired git about so tall?" He held a hand a few inches above his own head. "Dresses like Babbitt on a bad day?"

"Failing the cultural literacy quiz here, but yeah, that sounds like him." Buffy rubbed her forehead and pulled her hair back from her face, still avoiding the vampire's gaze.

"Is Willow going to be OK?" Dawn asked. "Tara can fix her, right?"

"I don't know. I hope so. Willy recovered, so..." Buffy frowned at Spike. "How do you know what Mr. Brainsuck looks like?"

With a common problem to focus on, the uncomfortable tension between the two of them dissipated like morning fog. "Harris and I crashed his picnic in Weatherly Park." Spike knelt down, opened the cooler and began transferring his blood to the fridge. "Showed up running like Old Nick was after him. His name is Tanner, he was one of Glory's lot, and he's still got a whole crew of nutters with him--they pulled a bait and switch on Harris, got him to go poncing off after a damsel in distress--"

It was Buffy's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Followed by his faithful vampire companion?"

Spike gave her a dirty look. "Couldn't let the bleeder wander off on his own, could I? Wouldn't last ten minutes, and you'd skin me for it. Though in his case, damned if I know what difference losing his mind would make. From what this Tanner bloke said when he tried his Tibetan memory trick on yours truly, if he ran into Will by himself, she'll get over it. Put those biscuits in the crate there, Pigeon," he directed Dawn. He examined the contents of said crate and held up the remaining bottle of whiskey with a frown. "Oi, I had two of these in here!" He sniffed suspiciously. "Slayer?"

Buffy groaned. "I don't have time to explain right now, but it was vitally necessary." A ferocious light entered her eyes. "This guy went after you and Xander? Xander's all right?"

"Eh--a bit knocked about. We dropped him off at the emergency room to have his hands seen to. Anya's with him. And I'm just fine, thank you for asking."

Buffy ignored him. "Dawn, why exactly are you here?"

"It was vitally necessary?" Dawn said with a weak grin. She held out a box of Ritz crackers. "Hungry? We can make peanut butter cracker sandwiches."

They ended up making up a plate full of crackers, cheese and apples to take down to Tara, Spike grumbling the whole time about not having signed on to feed the multitudes. Dawn held it carefully in one hand while climbing down the glorified ladder which served as a staircase to the lower levels.

Spike's downstairs was bigger than his upstairs, including the original lower level of the crypt, several rooms dug out beneath the cemetery, and access to the tunnels running all over Sunnydale. Though he had indeed gotten rid of the pile of moldering skulls (Dawn rather regretted the loss; the skulls had been pretty cool) the atmosphere was still leaned more towards the Addams Family than Better Homes and Gardens. There was real furniture down there now, but whenever he'd run into a coffin in the course of his excavations, Spike had hauled it out and incorporated it into the decor. Dawn occasionally speculated on whether or not the end tables still harbored their original occupants, but had never gotten up the nerve to ask.

The bedroom was off the main room through a low, irregular archway. It was a weird combination of comfortable and creepy. The floors were blanketed with a haphazard collection of oriental rugs. There was a bookshelf, a nightstand with an old-fashioned pitcher and basin, a coffin-cum-blanket chest, and a wardrobe which, at a guess, housed Spike's extensive collection of black jeans and t-shirts. Another coffin or two hung drunkenly out of the packed earth of the walls by way of decoration. The room was dominated by a huge old four-poster bed in dark wood, complete with canopy in hunter green and cream swirls. In the middle of the vast expanse of counterpane Willow was curled, small and waifish with her auburn hair in flyaway wisps about her face.

Tara looked up as they entered; she was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching Willow with a heartbreaking expression. Willow broke into an agitated wail when she saw Dawn. "Oh, the shining, the shining, come over the sea with the brightness inside..." She reached out, fingers crooked, raking the air with both hands. Dawn cringed back. She'd thought this was all over. She wasn't the Key anymore, she was just Dawn Summers, dammit! Wasn't it ever going to stop?

"I don't think it's a good idea, everyone being in here at once," Tara said, taking the plate with an apologetic look.

Buffy circled the bed; Willow had half-crawled, half-slumped over to the side opposite Tara, and was pawing aimlessly through Spike's pile of bedtime literature, shoving things under the bedstead at random. "Come on, Will, sit up." Willow ignored her, and Tara leaned over, took her lover firmly by the shoulders and pulled her upright. Buffy shot a helpless, guilty look back at the others. What on earth did _she_ have to feel guilty about? Dawn thought bitterly. She couldn't stop staring at Willow's slack, horrible, yearning face. She felt sick to her stomach.

"Come on, Bit," Spike said, taking her arm. "We'll give them some air."

Guilt or no guilt, she was exhausted, and it was a relief to collapse on the couch in the main room, though it was one of those stiff, fancy drawing-room type divans and not exactly built for comfort. Spike sat down on the end opposite and watched her, head on hand. Dawn tucked her arm under her head and stared across the room at the niche in the wall where Spike had once kept that pathetic shrine to her sister--the shrine was long gone, but the niche still had a couple of defiant snapshots tacked up: one copy of the picture of her and Buffy and Joyce which stood in the Summers' living room, but mostly a series of goofy pictures of her and Spike making faces at the camera that they'd taken at one of the four-for-a-dollar photo booths at Sunnydale Mall. Someday she'd find someone to explain why vampires wouldn't reflect in anything, but photographed just fine. "So--counting Willow, how many people have ended up dead or insane because of me?"

Spike snorted. "Zero. Don't recall you holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to suck anyone else's brains out."

She rolled over and stared up at the vaulted ceiling, lost in darkness and cobwebs. _I'm fifteen years old, I didn't really exist until those stupid monks shoehorned me into everyone's memories a year ago, I_ know_ that ho-bag Kirsty is badmouthing me to Kevin in first period history, Mom's dead and dad never calls, my sister is a vampire slayer and my best friend is a defanged vampire_. "Spike--when do I get to stop feeling like shit about existing?"

Spike leaned back, laced his hands behind his head, and pursed his lips. "It's been a long time, but I seem to recall that stage lasting from approximately age thirteen to age twenty-eight. 'Course between you and me, Bit, I was a bit of a wanker in my breathing days."

"What happened at age twenty-eight?"

"Dru killed me."

"Oh."

"All things considered, I don't recommend it as a cure for weltschmertz."

"Guess I'll pass."

Spike leaned over and pulled an afghan down from the back of the couch, tugging it over her shoulders. "Get some sleep, pet. Will'll be fine."

*****

Spike was slouched in the middle of the long gold couch when Buffy came out of the bedroom, one booted foot propped up on the coffin in front of it, the other folded under him. He was balancing a book on his bent knee, head cocked back a bit. Spike reading. She was still trying to get used to that. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as Giles' place, but once you knew to look for them, Spike had books stashed all over the crypt--tattered Remo Williams paperbacks and lurid romance novels rubbing spines with Shakespeare; Dorothy Parker living in literary sin with Hunter Thompson. They'd always been there, but somehow she'd never noticed before--before having died.

Her sister was curled up on the far end of the couch underneath a black-and-red crocheted afghan--more or less; Dawn's long-legged, coltish body didn't curl very compactly any longer. Her feet, still in their straggle-laced sneakers, hung off the couch, and her glossy chestnut hair fanned out over the arm. She was making a very soft noise as she slept, somewhere between a snore and a sigh. Buffy, unwilling to disturb her, walked over as quietly as she could and sat down beside Spike. His eyes flicked up as her shadow fell over him, then down to his arm's-length perusal of the book again. He seemed to have gotten over the impulse to hide it and pretend he'd only been watching Bob Barker. Not that that would work very well when the television was upstairs. "How's Will?"

Her shoulders slumped. "Same old. I wish we knew how long before we found him Willy'd been hit. It would give us some idea how long Will's going to be..." She felt tears welling up again. "Oh, god, the things I said to her! If that's the last thing she remembers of me..."

"Ah, love..." Subdued, Spike closed the book and tossed it over onto the coffin; it hit the curved lid with a thump and slid off. His hand hovered just short of her shoulder in that way he had of not quite touching her. "Haven't exactly been thinking the happiest thoughts about Will myself lately." His arm finally settled on the back of the couch, behind her. Still not touching, but the tension in his body was palpable.

A mewling noise came from the bedroom, followed by the wordless murmur of Tara's voice. Buffy shuddered, straightened, and looked over at the door. "Spike--"

"Buff--"

"Me first," she said, rushing the words out. "I'm tired of missing my chances to say things. If I'd talked to Willow weeks ago and tried to work this out--"

He made a small impatient noise. "Guilt runs in the family, does it? Love, this isn't your fault--"

"Shut up, Spike, this has nothing to do with Willow and I want to get this said. I was out of line last night. Not for wanting you to pay for your own blood, but for--for--" She stopped, stiff with frustration. "This is so hard to explain! For trying to--to force you to..." Spike sat up a bit straighter, head cocked in perplexity. Buffy gnawed on her lower lip. "I didn't want the reminder," she said at last. "I was forgetting there, for a minute, who you are. What you are. I don't want to do that."

His flinch was barely perceptible. Buffy cringed. "No! I don't mean it like--why do I suck at this so much?! I don't want to forget it because--because I don't want to forget anything about you. Spike, you've changed. A lot." _Enough? God, I don't know.._ . "Sometimes I can't believe how much." She swallowed, hands clasping convulsively in her lap. "But you did it by yourself. I can't jump in now and make you--"

The intensity in his voice was terrifying. "You know I'd do anything for you, love..."

"That's the problem! It wouldn't be real, don't you see? And if there's ever going to be anything between us--" (and oh, did his ears prick up at that) "It's got to be--there can't be any lies. For either of us. I--the loving me, I know that's big, bigger than I can really--but I can get love from a lot of places, Spike. You give me honesty, and that's... Never change that. Never. No matter what else--"

Spike didn't say anything, just sat there, attentive, gaze riveted to her face, waiting for her to finish. She couldn't deny, deep down, that it was a bit of a rush, this power she held over him, the more so because she knew it left her balanced on a knife's edge. Spike might be love's bitch, but even he had limits, as Drusilla could attest, and there was no guarantee she wouldn't push him to those limits, someday. The loa's inhuman voice rang in her ears. _What do you want him to do?_

"You don't have a soul. I can't ever pretend that you do. But you do have a mind. So promise me something, Spike. About the blood. In fact, about everything." She drew a deep shuddery breath. "Do what you _think_ is right. Even if I don't like it--even if I hate it, even if I hate you. It--it's got to be real, what I see when I look at you."

Spike sat there for a long time, studying her with those incendiary blue eyes. At last he sighed. "You don't make it easy on a bloke, do you, Slayer?"

She managed a shaky smile. "It's part of my charm."

"Maybe Harris will trade me for the flower problem."

"Huh?"

"Long story." The corners of his mouth twitched. "I was going to tell you I'd decided to give up the nummy people snacks for good, but in light of new information p'raps I should reconsider."

Buffy stared, floored. "Um."

The twitch turned into a grin. "Close your mouth, Slayer, you'll catch flies. I don't bloody well want to, you know. Imagine living on oatmeal with all essential vitamins and minerals added for the rest of your life and you'll get some idea of what the pig's blood diet is like." He laced his fingers together and rested his chin on his hands, dark brows knit, obviously thinking hard. "Tell you what," he said at last, "I won't drink anything that I don't know for certain came from a willing healthy donor." He quirked an eyebrow. "Blood from Willy's stable of drunks tastes like sodding turpentine anyway."

She studied him in turn. _This is Spike, technically evil vampire. Someone I shouldn't like, shouldn't trust, shouldn't want--and do_. "Okay. That's a decision I don't have to stake you for."

He snorted. "Ah, I should have guessed that was the downside to your little do-as-you-like speech."

"Hey, I have to be all with the honesty too." Buffy stared at the cover of the fallen book, but it was upside-down and the lettering was too faded to make out anyway. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the crushed-velvet upholstery. There was only a breath between them--literally; Spike inhaled sharply as her hair tickled his arm, and she felt his ribs brush lightly against her shoulder. Spike used breath the way a writer used punctuation, for emphasis, for clarity. Every rise and fall of that black-clad chest meant something: there were no unneeded breaths. Lucky her, she had to inhale all the time and there was no way he could tell which breath was spurred by mere need of oxygen and which from the imperative to draw as much of his scent into her lungs as possible.

Admitting to the attraction, even if only to herself, had probably been a mistake. _Do you think maybe you could go back to trying to kill me on a regular basis, Spike? It's way more effective than cold showers_ . Eyes tight shut, she could still map out the lineaments of his body relative to hers--nothing mystical or romantic about it, just that around Spike her Slayer's sense for a vampire's presence grew incredibly intense and specific: not just 'vamp nearby!' but 'Spike, right here!' It had been that way with Angel, once. Maybe it would be that way with any vampire she was around for a long enough time.

He wouldn't make the first move; he knew she didn't love him, and that she'd never act on the desire he'd always known was there. She wouldn't make the first move; she knew she couldn't possibly get involved with another vampire, especially a soulless one, most especially Spike. So they could go on like this forever, dance at arms' length in the exquisite torture of one another's presence, taunt one another in the desperate hope that one of them would snap, and somehow the results wouldn't be the other's fault. Or she could back off, return to a life where Spike was just another thing out there in the dark, put them both out of their misery.

Except that the thought of life without Spike in it had all the appeal of day-old Tab.

And wasn't she supposed to be being honest, here? She didn't love him. But she was no longer at all certain that she _couldn't_ love him.

"There's no way this isn't going to hurt, is there?" she said softly.

Spike didn't ask what she was talking about--he always knew. "Eventually? Yeh. But Christ, love, what doesn't, eventually?"

"Well. Someone once told me to risk the pain." Buffy leaned over--only an inch or two, all that was necessary--and closed the distance between them, sliding her arm behind him, her hand burrowing between the small of his back and the couch. Every muscle in his torso twitched in response to her touch, and he let out a long hissing sigh.

She'd done this before. A year ago, with Riley. A lifetime ago, with Angel. Even once with Spike, under the influence of Willow's mis-cast spell. She had loved the dead before, and her body remembered what she had tried to forget in the arms of the living. Familiar, the cool weight of his arm slipping down to rest on her shoulders, the room-temperature body next to hers slowly warming with her heat. Familiar, her own heartbeat sounding the all louder in her ears for lack of any answering beat in the chest beneath them. Familiar, the sensation of irregular breaths drawn and held far too long for human comfort, and the faint earthy scent of male vampire.

And different, the whipcord leanness of his body, the ease with which they fit together, the way his shoulder was the perfect height for her head. Different, the contours of his face beneath the blind explorations of her free hand, the angle of his jaw, the elegant jut of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath, the scar running across his left brow, legacy of another Slayer, long ago. Different, the long cool fingers, nicotine-stained, slightly callused, drifting across her own cheek and brow. Different, the crisp stiffness of his gelled hair and the way it sprang into traitorous curls when mussed. Different, the smell of leather and tobacco, whiskey and shaving soap that was uniquely _Spike_.

God, it felt good to touch him with no ulterior motive, felt as if years worth of tension were draining out of her through every square inch of their close-pressed bodies. Buffy opened her eyes, looking up into Spike's face, watching as astonishment and adoration and lust and (ah, for him too) sublime relief chased across it, and whatever he saw in her face (and she herself had no idea what the huge giddy bubble of emotion expanding outwards from her center was composed of) it couldn't have been too bad. Citrine fireworks burst and faded in the blue of his eyes, but his features were still entirely human. "Change," she said.

Spike blinked, customary eloquence fled. "Huh?"

"Change. I want to see all of you."

He looked at her a moment longer, and then the bones of his face shifted beneath her fingers, his canines lengthened into fangs and the demon ridges emerged from his brow, lowering over eyes gone lion-gold. She traced the new lines curiously. She was unused to seeing him like this; unlike most vampires, Spike spent most of his time in human guise, but there was a strange, harsh beauty even in this aspect of him. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you for a long time," she said, trailing one finger down his cheek.

His voice was husky. "Yes, love?"

Buffy stared deep into those leonine eyes and whispered in a voice as sultry as she could make it, "Why don't you have any eyebrows in game face?"

Spike exploded in snort of laughter, face melting back into humanity. "Fuck you, Slayer."

She smiled--the teasing one. "We'll see."

"Bitch." Looking at her as if he wanted to eat her whole.

"Pig." Looking at him as if she'd like nothing better.

"You've still got stupid hair."

Buffy twined her fingers in his own thoroughly disordered locks. "You _dare_ dis the hair, bleach boy? This means WAR!"

Spike leaned forward, eyes glittering beneath half-closed lids. "Bring it on, baby." His hands slid down her back, fingers kneading the muscles along her spine. He was growling deep down in his chest, a low purring rumble she'd only heard once or twice before (because really, how often was Spike relaxed and happy at the same time?) The sound vibrated through her whole body, curling her toes as her arms locked around his narrow waist and pulled him closer. _ Mmmm. Toasty._ If this was what a relatively chaste hug felt like, God help her when they actually got around to the lip action--_ waitaminute, lip action? Who says there's going to be--_

"Guys, Willow's--" Tara stopped, hand flying to her mouth, and the two of them broke apart guiltily. "Um. Awake. Now."

Spike groaned. Buffy whacked him on the shoulder and squirmed out from underneath him, her cheeks aflame. Tara's eyes were darting everywhere and anywhere but the couch. "I w-wasn't, uh, interrupting..."

"No," Spike grumbled, "But if you'll sod off for about fifteen minutes I can fix that."

"Don't start picking out curtains just yet." Buffy tugged her blouse into place. _Ego much?_ Once out of physical contact with the mind-altering substance that was Spike, the _Ohmigod I did_ what_ with_ who_ on the same couch my semi-innocent baby sister is sleeping on?_ reaction was starting to set in. _What, does he think one, uh, comradely, yeah, that was a good word for it, comradely, hug means I'm just going to swoon and tumble into his manly arms and--they are awfully nice arms, all muscley and... Stop that! _ Spike was just sitting there and grinning at her, doing that maddening thing with his tongue when Tara wasn't looking. "I'm going to go talk to Wills, and then I'm going to take Dawn home, and--"

Big in-no-way-innocent blue eyes blinked up at her. "Does she fancy a fireman's carry, or d'you want me to give you a ride?"

Damn. "I'll think about it."

"You do that, love. I know _I'll_ be thinking about it."

Buffy glared at him to no effect whatsoever, and beat a hasty retreat to the bedroom.

Willow was Willow again, sitting up in the middle of Spike's bed and nibbling on crackers and cheese. Tara had stayed out in the other room with Spike, abandoning Buffy to the mercy of her own good intentions. "So..." Buffy laced her fingers together on her lap and studied her nails intently. "You're feeling better?"

Willow nodded, rolling the edge of the coverlet into little curls with one hand and unrolling it again. "Better in the sense of not completely insane, yes. Otherwise... pretty brain-fried." She wrinkled her nose and lifted up a handful of coverlet. "And I think Spike smokes in bed. I'm going to smell like the Marlboro Man for a week."

"Hey, thanks to Mr. Possess-and-Run I practically bathed in bourbon. Join me in a mutual 'ew.'" _Though in certain select instances the combination isn't completely revolting--stop that!_ "Spike says he ran into the guy who did this to you. His name's Tanner, or at least that's what he's calling himself. Spike thinks he's one of the people Glory brainsucked. There seems to be a whole gang of them on the loose."

"Oh. That's good, I guess. Or not good. But useful. I-I can't remember much after I started to talk to him. It's all confused until I woke up here." Her haunted eyes reflected the candle flames, a muddle of light and dark. "But I can check the name against the hospital's admissions records last spring and see if it matches any of the known victims. Maybe we can find something that'll help us track him down. Plus this thing that took over Tara--got to be a big clue, right?"

"Are you sure you're up to all that?"

Willow summoned up a wan smile and tucked her hair behind her ears. "The Net Witch is all good to go."

"Well, that's good." Buffy licked her lips. "Will... I just wanted to tell you..." This was her night for awkward confessions, it seemed. "About what I said earlier. I'm sorry. Or not for what I said, for the way I said it--I mean, I was angry about what you did, but I shouldn't have--I should have tried to talk to you about it before, not--"

"Is it really that awful?" Willow broke in. Her hands had clenched on the blankets. In the dim light her eyes were the color of moss in deep water, and her voice sounded husky and smudged, like a bad recording. "Being back here. Alive. Is it really so bad that you have to hate me for it?"

"I don't hate you!" Buffy cried, taking the other woman's hands in her own. "I could never hate you, Wills, and that's what makes this so--no, it's not awful. It's not--it's not anything, really. I just feel so... so flat most of the time. Like I'm living behind glass. And every now and then the glass disappears and I'm really in the world again, but the glass always comes back, and the good moments make the rest that much worse--I can't remember where I was when I was dead. I can't even remember _if_ I was. There's this huge hole in me, and I can't..." She trailed off in frustration.

"That's part of the spell." Willow's voice was small and sad. "I changed the part of the spell where it says 'the gates of Hell shall open,' 'cause, you know, pretty sure you weren't in Hell. But mostly the Scroll of Aberjian was used to bring back people who'd been sent to, well, pretty awful places. The Raising spell's designed to make the subject forget the pains of hell, so they're not completely wild and crazy. Like Angel, when he came back?"

"So thoughtful of it. So I get to forget the pleasures of Heaven, or the world without shrimp, or wherever I was?" Buffy sighed. "I guess it could have been worse."

"Yeah." Willow blew hair out of her eyes. "I could have done something really stupid, like bringing you back to life inside your coffin. But..." A pleading note entered her voice. "Like you said this morning, it's getting better, right? I mean, most of today was good, right? So pretty soon you'll be fine again."

Buffy opened her mouth, but the expression on Willow's face, so full of raw, aching hope--_Please don't tell me I've ruined my best friend's life_ \--killed the words aborning. "Yeah, Will," she said, very softly. "I'll be fine."

After all, she wasn't really lying. Maybe she would be, someday.

*****

Dawn sat in the back seat of the DeSoto between Willow and Tara, lulled into a half-doze by the hum of the engine. Occasionally Spike or her sister, up in the front seat, would make some meaningless comment about the route home, or getting together with the rest of the Scoobies tomorrow. None of it was as interesting as the fact that Spike had his arm draped over the back of the front seat, his hand on her sister's shoulder, and was stroking the point of her collarbone with his thumb. And her sister not only hadn't broken his nose but seemed to be scooching across the front seat, getting closer and closer to him.

"I've got my keys," Tara said as the car pulled into the Summers' driveway and the engine rumbled to a halt. She got out and started up the walk to the front porch, stopping half-way. "Willow, do you need help?"

"I'm--well, maybe. Dawn?"

Dawn pried her eyes all the way open and got out with Willow on the street side. Willow made her way rather shakily around the car, leaning on Dawn's arm for the walk up to the porch. There was no weight to her, as if her ordeal had hollowed her out and all that was left was a Willow-shaped shell. Dawn felt as if she could have picked her up and carried her as easily as Buffy could have.

Tara undid the lock and the deadbolt and ushered Willow inside. "Where's Buffy?"

Dawn looked over her shoulder. "Still in the car, I think." She squinted over at the car; a vague shape moved behind the blacked-out windows of the DeSoto. "Buffy?" She hopped down off the porch, walked back over to the driveway, and rapped sharply on the windshield. "Buffy! You in there?"

The car lurched in place, the shocks protesting, and for a second a hand was plastered to the windshield. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! The blat of the horn was followed by a muffled yelp. Dawn jumped back as the door flew open. Spike tumbled out backwards with Buffy on top of him, her hands clutching the lapels of his duster, engaged in major kissage. Red-hot, desperate, someone's-coming-back-any-minute face-sucking. Spike hit the ground with a thump that would have knocked the air out of anyone who'd needed air, but neither of them seemed to notice the change in scenery.

"Aaaaahhhhh!!!" Dawn clapped her hands over her eyes. "If you guys don't break it up I'm going to need a parental advisory warning for my own driveway!"

Buffy drew back with a gasp, her eyes wide and stunned, and looked around, obviously trying to figure out how they'd gotten from the front seat to the driveway. Spike folded his arms behind his head and lay there on the concrete with what was quite possibly the most self-satisfied smirk in the history of the world, in no hurry to get her off of him. "Um," Buffy said. "I, uh, we slipped."

Dawn rolled her eyes. "Duh. Are you going to come in or make out in the driveway all night? Do I need to get the hose?"

Her sister met Spike's speculative grin with the Look Of Death, scrambled to her feet and dusted off the knees of her jeans. Spike heaved a melodramatic sigh and followed suit, getting back into the car. "See you tomorrow, love?"

"Uh. Yeah. For the date. I mean meeting. I mean at the Magic Box."

Buffy looked more than a little dazed as the DeSoto roared out of the driveway, to the probable annoyance of the neighbors. "So, uh, Dawn--you saw the, uh..."

"Mutual tonsil swabbing? Hard to miss." The situation cried out for a little more sisterly hassling. But Spike probably needed all the help he could get in light of the way Buffy's last vampire affair had ended up. Or heck, any of her affairs. Soul or no soul, Angel had been kind of a tool--blowing in with some useless, cryptic warning, getting Buffy all worked up, and disappearing again. Until Buffy'd boned him and he'd lost his soul and gone on a murderous rampage, anyway. Riley had been really cool for awhile, but then he'd gone all weird and left.

"It's not what it looks like," Buffy said. "It's--something else."

Dawn opened her mouth, looked at Tara, who was still standing saucer-eyed in the doorway, and shrugged. Buffy was freaked about the whole lack of soul thing, and maybe she had a right to be--she'd seen pre-chip Spike kill people, rip their throats out and drink their blood and toss them aside like used juice boxes. Dawn had only heard a lot of stories. Of course she'd seen him kill demons and revel in every blood-soaked minute of it, and if that guy who'd shot Buffy hadn't died it certainly hadn't been for lack of Spike trying, so it wasn't like she was completely naive about him or anything, and even post-chip Spike could be seriously scary when he put his mind to it... but she _still_ liked him better than Angel. At the best of times Angel'd been stiff as a board with Dawn, as if eleven-year-old girls were some sort of weird alien life form he wasn't sure he wanted to communicate with. It had been _fun_ stalking him and Buffy and popping up from behind the bushes with the perennial cry of little sisters everywhere-- "Whatcha doooooin'?"

"Buffy..." Tara seemed to have gotten her voice back. "Are you sure th-that..."

Buffy shook her head. "No. Not sure of anything."

Dawn put a hand on her sister's shoulder. "Whatever it is, I'm good with it." Buffy looked up at her, startled (and how cool was it that Buffy had to look up at her? Ha!) "I love you, dope. And I really like Spike. So I want you both to be happy." Despite noble intentions, she couldn't quite repress a snicker. "And you sure _looked_ like you were happy."

For some reason that made Buffy look even more surprised. "I was?" She closed the door behind them, started up the stairs, and it was only chance that Dawn was close enough behind her to hear her repeat softly to herself, "I was."


	10. Chapter 10

Buffy burrowed deeper into the covers, hugging her pillow, the sensations of waking muddled up with the fading dream... memory? _Arms tightening convulsively around her, strong enough for her to _feel_ it, strong enough that the pressure of her own embrace elicited a growl of pleasure instead of a wince of pain. A stir of realization: _I don't have to hold back_. Cool moist velvet of his tongue against hers, deft nervous hands roving along her sides, her back, pulling her closer, never close enough. Scenting her desire, his growl going from contented purr to something savage, primal, dangerous. Deep in her belly a molten internal pulse ignited in response_...

She woke with a gasp. Morning sun slanted through her windows, drawing trails of light across the bedspread. She heard voices downstairs, smelled coffee brewing--or reconstituting, or whatever you called it when hot water hit Folger's Instant. Maybe someday she'd get up the nerve to experiment with the coffee maker again. Surely it couldn't be too hard to make it do the drippy thing instead of the running dry and catching fire thing. Coffee, coffee, coffee, think about--Spike.

Buffy rolled over with a groan. She shouldn't be feeling all warm and tingly. Triple plus ungood. She flung the covers aside with a shiver that had nothing to do with the nippy fall air, pulled her robe off the bedpost and struggled into it. Shower. Cold shower. Very cold shower. That worked for guys, right? Into the bathroom. Brush teeth, stare blearily at un-made-up morning Buffy-face in mirror. Remember to take off robe before entering shower.

She almost leaped right through the closed shower door when the icy spray hit her. Abandoning her pursuit of asceticism, she frantically twisted the hot water on. There, that was bearable. Cool, not cold,  
just like--okay, hot shower. Very hot shower.

In the unforgiving light of morning the events of the previous night were surreal. One minute she was giving a really impressive speech on valuing honesty over kissy-face, and the next she was scarring Dawn permanently with Slayer Porno Theatre. Not that Dawn hadn't spied on her and Angel, or her and Riley for that matter, half a million times, the little perv. But they'd been boyfriends, and Spike was--Spike. And oh, God, Tara'd seen the  
whole thing. Both times. _Tara probably doesn't even _  
have_ baser urges. She's like a Platonic solid. Or something Greek, anyway. Please let them all have been eaten by Zagros demons before I come down..._

One advantage of waking up late was that Dawn had already left for school. Maybe if she was lucky everyone else would be gone, too. An hour later, having determined that showers of any temperature were not much good for anything besides the removal of dirt, and after pulling out everything in her closet at least twice in a futile hunt for something that didn't scream 'I'm having wet dreams about Spike,' Buffy trotted downstairs in jeans and a camel-colored cowl-necked sweater, hair wrapped up in a towel and stomach inhabited by a large flock of butterflies.

Much to her chagrin, though it was almost ten, Willow and Tara were still in the kitchen. Didn't they have classes anymore? Her feet slowed, then stopped, and she stood wavering on tip-toe on the third stair from the bottom, hand on the railing and ears straining to catch Tara's low, concerned voice.

"...another vampire? No matter how much help he's been lately, it's only been a year since he was trying to kill us. Hard to believe it's not some kind of--of vampire fetish."

Willow didn't sound quite as dire. "Maybe--love the thing you kill, and all? That would be _deeply_ psychological. But, benefit of the doubt--she told me she just likes him. And he's saved her life almost as many times as he's tried to kill her now, which, big plus. Besides, he is wicked cute."

"If you say so." Tara sounded dubious. "I'm more worried about him being plain wicked. I know he's pretty much non-practicing evil at the moment--" A thoughtful pause. "Cute, really? He's always seemed a little funny-looking to me. His head's too big for the rest of him. And he's kind of scrawny."

On the staircase, Buffy's eyes went green with outrage. _Jeez, Tara, I thought you were gay, not blind_. Just because Spike wasn't the poster boy for steroid abuse... _And I do not have a thing for vampires. I'm dogged by vampires with a thing for me._

Willow snickered. "Hey, 'compact yet muscular,' remember? Just ask Xander." She went on, almost regretfully, "I don't think we need to worry. Not like it isn't doomed anyway, with the ghost of Angel past still looming over her love life. It messed things up with Riley, it'll mess things up with Spike. I really feel sorry for the poor guy."

Buffy's fingers tightened on the bannister; Willow couldn't have come up with a better one-two punch if she'd practiced for a week. _Not going to break it. Can't afford the carpenter bills_. She stomped on the last two steps as loudly as she could and walked into the kitchen. Willow and Tara were both sitting at the kitchen table, solemn as a pair of owls, all trace of speculation vanished. They looked up in unison as she came in. There was a platter of croissants on the table into which severe incursions had been made, which hinted that they'd been waiting for her for some time. She flashed them a jittery little smile. "Hey, guys."

No reply. They'd been chatty enough when she wasn't there. With an uneasy glance at her housemates, Buffy went to the refrigerator. She dithered over cherry or blueberry yogurt for a minute before going for the cherry. She rescued her favorite coffee mug from the sink and rinsed it off before dumping a generous teaspoonful of instant coffee into it. She filled it with water and stuck it in the microwave. "Hola? Wilkommen? Bienvenue? Willow, how are you feeling?"

Willow's face was shadowed for a moment and she seemed to shrink in on herself. "I kinda know how you felt during that Cruciamentum test."

"Well, I'm sure you'll..." Buffy trailed off. "It's not permanent, right? You just wore yourself out blowing doors open?"

Willow forced a smile. "Yeah. All better in no time. But enough about me."

Buffy tried her best to look blank. She's been doing that so much lately, why couldn't she pull it up now when she needed it? She felt as if Spike had peeled off a couple of layers of skin with that kiss, leaving her painfully tender to the touch. The witches exchanged uncomfy looks. "Buffy," Tara said, "Last night--"

Buffy dropped into a free chair and buried her face in her hands, peeking out at the two of them between her fingers. "Isn't it a little too early for last night?" She essayed another feeble smile. "Guess not. Silly me. First thing we need to do is like you said, Will, see if we can track down this Tanner guy--who he was, and how he's doing this, and where he is now. Second thing--"

"We didn't mean that part of last night," Willow broke in. "More the last part. With the, you know..."

Buffy sat back and folded her arms. "Spit-swapping? Block it from your minds. I have. Stress. It was stress over Willow. Also possibly a side effect of the inhalation of bourbon fumes."

Tara went as red as Willow's hair. "Why you did it isn't any of our business," she said.

Willow nodded vigorously in agreement. "We won't even think about thinking about asking."

The microwave beeped. Buffy ignored it. "Glad you feel that way. Really not ready to dish at this precise moment." _Lost use of personal pronouns. Very bad sign_.

Tara clasped her hands on the table in front of her and kept her eyes firmly fixed upon her left thumbnail. "We just needed-- we thought--Buffy, I know you've been, um, I-I said last year I'd be there if you ever needed to talk about anything, so if you do, I still am. And Willow too, of course! We--we just want you to be sure you know what you're getting into."

The silence stretched from seconds into minutes, until broken by the scrape of Buffy's chair as she got up to get her now-lukewarm coffee. She sat back down and dunked a croissant in the mug. "Let's see." She bit the coffee-sodden end off the croissant and began ticking off points with the remaining pastry. "Spike is a soulless vampire restrained from killing people only by a piece of government hardware with an uncertain expiration date, and because he has the hots for me. If the chip fails, I may have to kill him. If the chip doesn't fail but he decides he doesn't love me after all, I may have to kill him." She turned a wide-eyed look on the other two. "That about cover it?"

Willow and Tara did another synchronized squirm. "Um..."

"It's just..." Willow gave Tara an agonized look. "Buffy. You know I like Spike as much as anyone--well, except you of course, since me? _so_ not with the kissing--but someone's got to say it. How long did it take you to work up to killing Angelus? How many people died in the meantime?"

Buffy flinched. _Oh, dirty pool, Rosenberg..._ "It's different," she said. Her throat had gone dry. "I loved Angel."

Tara looked skeptical. "And you don't love Spike."

Buffy became deeply absorbed in unwinding the layers of her croissant. She shrugged. "No." _Not yet. Maybe never. Maybe five minutes from now. We're running a pool; who wants three PM Friday?_

There were things Tara obviously wanted to say; Buffy could see them bubbling inside her, but Tara didn't say them. Didn't have to; a small self-critical voice in the back of her own head had them on repeating loop already. _Spike only wants you because A) he wants to get back at Angel for stealing Dru, B) He's obsessed with Slayers, C) There's nothing better on telly, D) All of the above. You only want Spike because A) You've got some sick vampire fetish, B) You're an enormous slut, C) The famous Slayer death wish, D) All of the above. If by some outside chance he really does love you, you'll mess it up anyway, just like you messed up with every single other man you've ever loved. Lather, rinse, repeat._ "Look guys, if I go off the rails and you shove me back on, I'll thank you later. But right now I'm not even on the train yet." She pulled the tab off the top of her yogurt and plopped a spoonful onto the last bite of croissant. "It's just one kiss."

Willow made an apologetic grimace. "When in one day you go from all 'This can never be!' to wild passionate vampire kissage on the driveway... I worry, you know? And not just about you, about Spike too." She leaned forward, conspiratorial. "So, was he any good? I mean, from the moaning and slurpy noises I'm guessing yes, but--" Tara cleared her throat and Willow clapped a hand over her mouth, looking guilty. "Just asking." She mouthed 'Talk later!' behind Tara's back.

Tara still didn't look happy. "If you don't have any feelings for Spike, should you be... encouraging him?"

"I didn't say no feelings!" Buffy smacked her mug down on the table, sloshing coffee onto the newspaper. "There are feelings! Lots of feelings! With Spike there is nothing _but_ feelings! Ow!" She grabbed a napkin and mopped hot coffee off her front. Now she'd have to change shirts. "I just don't know which feelings they are." She sighed. "Look--what I had with Angel... I can never do that again. I've tried, right? It doesn't work. I don't have that kind of love in me any more. Trust me, outside of the fact that they're both the same sex and species, Spike and Angel are as different as night and day, and I could never feel the same way about Spike."

She stabbed her spoon into the heart of the yogurt. It was true. As far as it went.

*****

Late Friday afternoon at the Magic Box. The DeSoto skidded to a stop in front of the shop, and Spike leaped out of the car, flung a blanket over his head, and dashed across the sunlit expanse of sidewalk. He yanked the door open so fast he almost twisted the handle off, and dove inside to the accompaniment of the shop bell. There was a perfectly good tunnel leading into the Magic Box's basement, but it meandered, and he'd been in a hurry. He had people--well, person--well, Buffy--to see, and damned if he was going to let a little sunshine take him out of  
his way, at least for the approximately thirty seconds a vampire his age could take it before starting to smoulder.

Anya was behind the counter breaking out a few more rolls of quarters for the change drawer of the cash register, taking the opportunity to fondle the shiny coins while no one was paying attention. She looked up, took in the arrival of the sun-scorched vampire, murmured, "If you catch the greeting cards on fire, Spike, you're paying for them," and went back to her receipts.

"Love you too, pet," Spike growled, pulling the slightly charred army blanket off his head. He slouched over to the back of the store, where Rupert Giles sat at the circular table in the book section, going through the pile of neat, color-coordinated folders filled with neat, indexed notes in front of him. He tossed the blanket under the table, and sat down opposite the Watcher. Neither spoke for a moment. At last Spike said, "You heard?"

Giles took off his glasses. "It was on the radio this morning. I hardly consider myself a sentimentalist, but I confess I spent the whole morning listening to _Rubber Soul_."

"Bloody waste." Spike produced a flask from the interior pocket of his duster, and unscrewed the top. "To George." He tossed back a swallow and handed it to Giles, who followed suit.

"To George."

"Who?" Anya asked. "Is this some English ritual I'm not aware of?"

Vampire and Watcher turned twin gazes of laser death on her, and then Giles shook his head. "Never mind, Anya. I believe he was before your time. Well." He glanced at the two cassette tapes beside the pile of folders, and sighed. "I'd been hoping to go over the last few sessions and clarify a few points, but it appears that the last few sessions have yet to be transcribed."

Spike made a mock-sorrowful noise. "Pity, that. Guess we'll be forced to do something interesting instead."

"Which would naturally preclude your participation," Giles said with champagne dryness. Spike smirked at him and tucked his flask away again. Move it along, nothing to see here. Giles adjusted his glasses and gave the cassettes a severe look. "I must speak to Willow about this. If she's unable to make time for this project due to her schoolwork, I'll ask the Council to assign us a secretary." He slid a fresh cassette into the recorder,  
hit the play button, and said into the microphone, "Interview with the--I'm sorry, I can't say it--William the Bloody, a.k.a Spike, conducted by Rupert Giles on November 30, 2001. Session six." He clicked the pause button. "I don't suppose I can convince you to give your real surname this time?"

Spike lazed back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest, obstinacy in every line of his body. "You suppose correctly. I told you when we started this, none of your Council's bloody business who my family was. I'll spill my guts about whatever you care to hear after 1880, but anything prior to my turning's off limits. Take it or leave it. And speaking of taking it, I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart." He held out a hand. "Where's my honorarium?"

Giles sighed and pulled out his wallet, and counted out five twenties into the vampire's palm. "Mm. One can but try. Since one of the purposes of this study is to document the survival of aspects of the host personality in the post-turning vampire, it would be immensely helpful if we had some idea of what the human William the Bloody was like."

Spike rolled his eyes. It had been a little galling to discover just how patchy, incomplete, and downright inaccurate the Council's dossier on him was--not that he hadn't started a lot of the contradictory stories himself in the early years of the twentieth century, when he'd been trying to establish a reputation for himself apart from Angelus and Darla, but weren't these Council chaps supposed to be vampire boffins? "All present and accounted for, minus the annoying consciency bits. If you're all that keen to find out, exercise your massive brain and--"

"Actually, presuming you gave the correct date for your death, I can have the Council access Scotland Yard's records for persons discovered dead by violence on and immediately after that day," Giles said with a wintry smile at Spike's discomfited look. He began the recording again. "If I recall correctly, we left off in...?"

Spike gave up. He never should have agreed to cooperate, but cash was cash, and it wasn't that often that he had a chance to acquire some in a completely legitimate fashion. The downside was that eventually Giles was going to pick up enough clues to discover his real name, and... well, what if he did? Not as if he'd been important enough in life to merit more than a two-line obituary tucked away in some obscure corner of the _ Times_. William the not so Bloody, born 1852, died 1880, accomplished bugger all in between. Finally, some good came of being a complete non-entity. "New York. Dru and I were hunting the Battery that year, though we could have gone anywhere, done anything--you wouldn't sodding well believe the number of drifters there were about. We hadn't eaten so well since the influenza epidemic during the Great War--God's truth, we could kill two or three people a day for weeks and no one'd notice. It was like that everywhere. Whole bloody country on the move, hoping things'd be better in the next town over, and the locals more relieved than not when some hobo turned up stiff and minus a few pints, 'cause there's one less stranger to be knocking at their door looking for handouts and work that wasn't to be had. We had this cold-water flat in--"

His mind started drifting almost immediately. There were few things that pleased Spike so much as the sound of his own voice, but today his attention was elsewhere, on the memory of warm hands and warm lips and grey-green eyes gone hazy with passion, and recollections of seventy-year-old kills couldn't compete. He hadn't expected her to...any of it.

He had no romantic illusions about what it all meant--it was all heat and desire on her part, the painful prickling of a numb body and soul coming back to life. It would burn wild and bright and hot and then be gone, leaving him--one way or another--in ashes. So much more than he'd hoped for, so very, very much less than he wanted... but he'd take it. Oh, yes, he'd take it, because who knew when that flame would be snuffed out again?  
Better burned than left in the dark. He glanced at the clock on the shop wall again. Three-thirty-seven. Twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds until Buffy walked in the door. He licked his lips and realized that Giles was staring at him strangely. He had absolutely no idea what he'd just said. Oh, well. He always had more fun with these interviews when Dawn was around to play suitably horrified audience, anyway; Giles lacked an appreciation for Grand Guignol. "So I killed 'em and I ate 'em, the end. Rupert, what are you doing about the Slayer's salary?"

Giles turned off the cassette player. "Not that it's any of your business, but I am working on it." He took off his glasses and began to polish them.

Spike jogged one foot against the nearest chair leg. "What's the holdup? Just put her on the bloody payroll."

Giles shrugged, though the set of his shoulders gave more than a little hint that he was as annoyed about the situation as Spike was. "The Council's still considering the matter. There's no precedent for an adult Slayer living independently of her Watcher. Little enough precedent for an adult Slayer. Few last as long as Buffy has."

"Yeh, takes a licking and..." _Buffy. Licking. Rrrrowr_ . Giles was staring at him again. Twenty-one minutes and forty-two seconds. "Never mind. They're making her sweat because she had them by the short and curlies last year, aren't they?"

"The thought has crossed my mind," Giles admitted. "I doubt we'd be seeing quite this much red tape and paperwork had Buffy been slightly, er, more tactful in her dealings with them. Once I return to England and can deal with the matter in person I expect things will clear up." He left unsaid the _Or Ripper will have a talk with someone_ part, but Spike didn't need to hear it. Giles would have made one hell of a vampire. The Watcher gave the untranscribed cassettes an irritated glance. "Assuming this project ever ends and allows me to leave for England, of course."

Spike shrugged. The thought of seeing London again was appealing--he hadn't been home for decades--but if Giles couldn't manage to live an interesting life in California, Spike doubted he'd have much better luck in Bath. And if he hadn't figured out that Willow was dawdling in order to keep him in the States as long as possible, Spike didn't feel obliged to enlighten him. "Cheer up, Rupes, I've only got so much life to narrate. Though if you'll keep paying me I'll be happy to start making things up."

The bell on the front door jangled, and Xander bounced in, sporting an impressive collection of bandages on both hands. "Hey, guys," he said, leaning over the counter and kissing Anya on the top of her head. He came over and flopped down at the table. "Hey, G-Man. Where's the Buffster?"

Spike smirked and waved a completely healed hand at him. Giles transferred the irritated glance from the cassettes to Xander. "She and Willow and Tara should be here shortly. And don't call me that."

Seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds. Spike fidgeted in his chair. Giles, having learned the hard way that quizzing Spike on anything when he was in the throes of one of his hyperactive fits was worse than useless, shoved the tape recorder to one side and began going through the folders again. Spike got up and started pacing, back and forth from the table to the ladder leading to the loft where the restricted grimoires were kept. He needed a cigarette. The alley out back was in shadow at this time of day, but if he left he might miss her arrival, and he didn't want to miss one more minute of Buffy if he could help it. Of course he wasn't certain how she was going to react. Since Dawn and Tara had been witness to their interrupted snogging session, she couldn't get cold feet and pretend the whole thing had never happened. Or could she? The Niblet didn't exactly count, and Tara was the Black Hole of Calcutta of discretion. She probably wouldn't breathe a word of the incident without Buffy's permission. Bloody hell.

The doorbell jangled again and Buffy walked in (twelve minutes and fifty-two seconds early, thank God he hadn't gone for that cigarette!) followed by Willow and Tara, the former looking tired and the latter uncomfortable. Buffy was wearing that red halter top that made him want to bite through the straps. She'd done something to her hair, too, lightened it up a little, and it curled softly around her shoulders and the smooth creamy  
column of her neck. He grinned at her. Couldn't help it.

She brushed right by him. Cut him cold, wouldn't meet his eyes. Buffy skirted the table and sat down between Giles and Xander, eyes still downcast, white teeth nibbling on her lower lip. Sod it all. She was going to back out on him; he could feel it in his bones--going to insist that the whole thing was an aberration and leave him to the cold comfort of Pearly Palm and her five sisters again. God knows what he'd been expecting;  
not hearts and flowers, surely, but some kind of acknowledgment. She was having second thoughts, and she expected him to wag his tail and slink back to his doghouse until called for. Well, bugger that. He'd tasted blood and he wasn't going to give up this easily.

Willow and Tara took their seats, relegating him, as usual, to the background of the bookshelves. Willow flipped her laptop open and began to finger-dance across the keyboard. Spike hitched himself up on the railing of the stairs and glowered. _Honesty, is it? Do as I say, not as I do, eh, Slayer? We'll see about that._

*****

Safely ensconced behind a wall of Scoobies, Buffy kept her eyes attentively on Xander as he finished narrating his and Spike's adventures of the previous night. In her peripheral vision, Spike favored her with an insolent raising of one brow. He was mad. What right did he have to be mad? Not like she'd signed a pre-nup with him or anything. It was just one stupid (glorious, mind-melting) kiss. Xander finished his story and Tara and Willow launched into theirs. _Don't look at Spike. Look at table, not at gorgeous pouting vampire_. She folded her hands. "So--in short, we've got a crew of Glory's left-over crazies running around sucking brains right and left."

"It's not just that," Xander said. "If this Tanner guy creates a new crazy every time he does this mind-suck thing for the whole crew, then when do the crazies reach critical mass? One person won't be enough, and he'll have to start grabbing two or three at a time. This could get out of  
control."

Tara was doodling on a legal pad, making a little sketch of the ritual as Xander had described it, her fair brows dipping together. "It sounds like they were using a really weirded-out version of the spell Willow used to cure me--they're taking mental energy from one person and transferring it to another." She tapped the pen on one of the curlicues. "I wish you remembered more of the details."

"Well, sor-ree," Xander grumbled. "Next time I'm being sacrificed I'll ask them to untie my hands so I can take notes."

Willow produced another folder, this one full of printed web documents and photos, laid it in the center of the table and flipped it open. Buffy leaned forward and picked one of them up. It was definitely a younger version of the man she'd confronted in the cemetery, a graduation photo, maybe. He looked bright and hopeful. "Daniel Evelyn Tanner," Willow said. "Born May 22, 1956, right here in Sunnydale. Attended Sunnydale High, graduated near the top of his class, left for Yale in 1974. Nothing more about him until 1992, when he came back to Sunnydale to live a completely uneventful life. He's in the phone book and the voting records, but he seems to be retired. Until Glory captured him and turned him into one of her brain-dead minions. He was admitted to Sunnydale General Hospital on April 16, 2001 for observation for schizoid behavior, and disappeared with the rest of the crazies in May. And that's the last official word on Mr. Tanner--missing and presumed dead."

Xander snorted. "But actually alive and confirmed nuts."

Tara bit meditatively at her thumbnail. "I don't understand where the loa fits in. Most of the traditional practitioners in Southern California are into Santeria, not Voudoun."

"Is it of the bad? This loa thing?" Xander asked. "Some kind of demon?"

Giles looked up. "Not precisely. Loa or Lwa are Haitian ancestral spirits or gods, New World versions of the Orisha of Western Africa, which are primarily Yoruban or Dahomeyan in origin, and while there are some unsavory aspects--"

"They're a mixed bag, good and bad wise," Tara finished.

"Quite. Ritual possession plays a large role in their worship, so this was not necessarily an inimical move."

"We'd have known if this Tanner was a practicing houngan," Anya said. "Every witch, wizard, and sorcerer in Sunnydale orders supplies through the Magic Box."

"Right," Tara agreed. "I looked some stuff up today too. What he did last night wasn't a real Voudoun ritual--no drums, no offerings, no invocation, no nothing. Ghede normally wouldn't come if he was called like that--no self-respecting loa would. So either Daniel Tanner is an incredibly powerful wizard, strong enough to summon what amounts to a minor god without the proper ritual--or Ghede came because he wanted to. Because he had something important to tell us." She looked at Buffy. "What exactly did he say to you?"

Buffy shrugged. "He gave me three questions--I asked what was wrong with Willow and how to fix her, mainly--and he gave me the kind of totally useless answers I usually get from random mythical creatures and then told me that I was asking the wrong questions anyway." Buffy began picking the eraser of the nearest pencil to shreds. "Since Willow's fine now, it was a pretty pointless encounter all around. If there were any shining beacons of answers in there, I'd be shouting them from the rooftops, promise."

"You should try to remember exactly what he said," Tara persisted. "Ghede's advice sounds pointless or strange sometimes, but it's always accurate."

Buffy stuck out her lower lip. "Right. For an advice-giving god, he was a complete pig."

Tara shrugged. "It's a Trickster figure thing. He's dead. The dead are beyond punishment."

"Don't I wish," Spike muttered.

Tara continued, "They can do and say what the living don't dare. But the advice is good, and whatever he said could be vital, so if you can remember the exact wording--"

"I'll try. But right now we have to figure out what to do about the brain-eating non-zombies. We can't just kill them. This isn't really their fault."

"It's ours," Tara said. "It never even occurred to me to wonder what happened to all the others...and it should have."

She was really upset, Buffy noted. Had she ever felt like that? Spike's soup kitchen jibe still bothered her. She took her duties as Slayer seriously, but had she ever really felt that kind of personal concern for the people she was protecting? She saved lives because it was the right thing to do, but she couldn't say she got much personal satisfaction out of it anymore, if she ever had. Was this how Spike felt, going through the motions of goodness because he couldn't do anything else?

He was still there, still looking, pale eyes calling to hers. _Do not look back_\--

Xander stirred uneasily, his hand grasping Anya's. "We were all pretty thrashed that night."

"I know--but all the rest of the summer?" Tara shook her head. "They've been living like that for months, trying to take care of themselves--I know what it's like, being like that! I should have--we should have--"

Guilty silence reigned for a moment, to be broken by Spike's impatient, "Should've. Didn't. Cry me a river. What do we do about it now?"

Buffy shot him a daggery look. Did he have to rub her nose in the fact that he didn't give a flying flip? "We try to fix them. Will--what about the spell? Is the one they're using defective? You don't have to go out and turn someone into a drooling idiot every two weeks to keep Tara going."

"I'm pretty sure this Tanner guy's using an inefficient version of the spell. Maybe he overheard me doing it and didn't catch all the words or something. My version's a permanent fix, but the energy's still gotta come from somewhere. Someone. I'm working on it." Willow's tone was a trifle defensive still; she hunched over the laptop, all her attention on the screen. "But  
like I said before, the original mental energy's gone, with Glory. Unless... maybe I could draw on some other kind of energy..." Her eyes went distant, then sparked with renewed enthusiasm. "Ooooh. That's a thought." She snatched Tara's pen and started scribbling, oblivious to Tara's sudden air of worry.

Buffy sat back, relieved. "Coolness. The big gun fires again."

Spike raised an eyebrow, slid off the bannister and sauntered over to the table, hands in pockets. "Forgetting something, aren't we? While Will plays Albert Schweitzer this Tanner bloke's out rounding up more brain food."

"Not forgetting, Spike." She began tapping the mangled pencil on the table. "I just haven't decided what the best course of action is yet. We can't just take him out. He's human."

"I dunno, Slayer, quite a few other things seem to have slipped your mind lately."

The acid in his voice snapped her head up to meet his eyes at last. Buffy shoved her chair back, jumped to her feet and advanced on him. Spike stood his ground in that hipshot slouch that she thought of as his hunting pose. She glared up into his half-lidded eyes, three-inch heels ensuring that she met him only a few inches shy of nose to nose. She could beat him black and blue if she wanted to and he couldn't lift a finger to stop her; where the hell did he get off looking so intimidating? "I haven't forgotten _anything._"

"Really... _love_?"

That insolent drawl went straight to the beast in the back of her brain that was responsible for fighting and... other stuff, caught it by the scruff of the neck and made it hiss in rage. She hadn't given in to the urge to hit him for a long time, but she was itching to do so now; there were times when the only thing that could sum up the tangled mess of emotions he roused  
in her was a good swift punch in the nose. Everyone else was watching them with uneasy confusion. She bared her teeth in something an uninformed observer might have taken for a smile. "Excuse me," she said, piling on the sugar, "I need to talk with Spike in private."

She grabbed his arm, feeling his muscles tense under her fingers, and dragged him behind the counter, out the back door of the shop, into the alley. Too familiar, the scraps of paper, the dirty concrete, the crunch of grit and broken glass beneath the soles of her feet, the faint nauseating smell of spoiled food from the dumpster behind the Espresso Pump down the block. Why did she end up having so many conversations with Spike in alleys? "What is _with_ you?"

Spike had straightened, weight shifted forward on his toes, watching her like a cat with a mouse. The faint bitter smirk on his lips was insufficient mask for the hurt in his eyes. "Gonna hit me, love?" he purred. "Just like old times? Been awhile, hasn't it? You go right ahead. Give it to me good. You know you want to."

She didn't stop to think why the words were familiar, just lashed out in blind fury. Spike dodged, but she was just a hair faster than he was, and her fist clipped his jaw; she felt his teeth graze her knuckles. Spike fell back with that mad grin, licking his own blood from his lips, feral yellow flickering in his eyes. A useless, toothless threat; he couldn't bite--or  
yes, he could, just not with his fangs, bite deeper than she wanted to think about. Buffy stood there in the lee of the dumpster, fists clenched, chest heaving, on the verge of tears for no reason she could name. "What's wrong with you, Spike?"

He shook himself, rolling his shoulders. "With me? Take a sodding guess."

"This is what it's been all along, isn't it? You really do get off on me beating you up!" She was going to be sick, she was sure of it. And she was not, not, not going to hit him again, not going to give him what he wanted.

Spike began circling her. "I get off on _fighting_ you, you stupid bint. You and this lovely piece of silicon in my brain won't let me get off any other way. And you get off fighting me--don't deny it, I can smell you getting all hot and bothered. You like whaling on a bloke who can't hit back? You like it better than what we did last night?" His voice was a dead-serious snarl. "If I could hit back I dunno as I could choose one dance over the other either. But you're going to have to. I know you'll never love me. I'm going to love you till I'm dust, but I'm damned if I'm going to sit for this. I'll take the touch any way I can get it, but I get this much say--kiss me or kick me, but it's one or the other. You can't have both, not till I can have both too."

With a sob she lunged at him. Spike ducked the blow, feinted left and dodged behind her. Buffy spun to follow him. "Make your mind up, Slayer." He blocked her incoming fist, dodged her kick and caught her by the heel, using her momentum to flip her over - all defensive moves, skating on the narrow edge of what the chip classified an attack. She twisted in mid-air, landing in a crouch, kicking out from it and knocking Spike's feet out from  
under him. He was rolling even as he hit the ground, and bounced to his feet breathing hard and fast, but far too shallowly for someone who really needed the oxygen. "What's it going to be, Slayer? This? Or the other?"

Buffy squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. She'd died--twice now, for crying out loud! Was her life going to be like this forever, slipping back into the same old patterns like falling into quicksand, jumping back on the same endless merry-go-round? God knew she she hadn't asked to come back, but she was here--did it have to be the same thing all over again? Couldn't she make it different this time, somehow? _I don't love him. He can't love me, or--_ No, she couldn't even think about that, couldn't pull up those three-year-old memories that still throbbed and ached at certain words, certain glances, like shrapnel healed into an old wound. _I can't, because it would be wrong..._

_ The dead are beyond punishment._

No, they weren't. Not hardly. But she was on her third life now. _Her_ life, no one else's. Not Tara's, not Willow's, certainly not Angel's. Hers, to make of what she would--what she dared.

Spike was still there when she opened her eyes; giving her a long, anything but expressionless stare. He was always going to be there, watching her back, irritating the hell out of her, making her life... a life. If she let him.

_Wrong_ was a world, a life, without Spike in it. "This, Spike. It's going to be this." She lunged for him again, and he didn't make a move to stop her.

*****

Truth to tell, he'd expected another punch, and didn't have the heart to block it. But her hands were open, and her fingers warm on the back of his neck as she grasped him, pulled him down, and his hands were tangled in the tawny silk of her hair and her sweet vicious mouth was savaging his, lips tongue teeth devouring one another, she blood to him, he air and food and water to her. Their bodies spoke to one another, pressed up against the brickwork, old tensions giving way to new ones--now that they had this it was impossible not to want more. Soon. _Now_. How did this cris-cross thing go? In about ten seconds he would bite through the damn straps. Her hands left his shoulders and he growled in protest until he realized that they were tearing at his belt buckle and why in _hell_ had he been such a git as to wear button-fly jeans today--

** _Grrrrrrrrrrrraaaaarrr._ **

Buffy gasped into his chest, "Ah! Yeah! Do that!"

Spike froze, fingers tightening on her shoulders. "Love..." He was having trouble getting enough breath to form the words. "That wasn't me."

She turned in his arms, just in time to see the wall of cinnamon-gold fur rolling by. Bear. Big bear. Fucking enormous bear. The bear looked at the two of them and shook its massive head, rubbery black lips peeling away from a set of fangs that put Spike's to shame. The loading dock of the store across the alley was faintly visible through its sides. It rumbled at them again, then lurched into motion with a contemptuous grunt. A minute later it was gone.

Spike collapsed back against the wall, shivering. Buffy stared at him. "Spike. Spike! You're hyperventilating! Stop breathing!" She looked up at him, perplexed. "I've seen you take on fire-breathing, spine-covered, acid-dripping Things five times your size with a song in your heart. What's the deal with Winnie the Pooh?"

"I don't like bears, all right?" He straightened up and peered cautiously around the dumpster. There was no sign of the bear. "It's a bloody childhood trauma."

Buffy bit her lip, trying to hide a smile. "You didn't have a childhood."

Spike opened his mouth, decided that the argument about whether he was or wasn't William wasn't worth getting into at this point, and prowled round to the other side of the dumpster, checking for bear tracks. "Well, if it's not mine, I wish to hell that ponce William had taken it with him when he left. Just be glad it's not sodding bunnies." He took a deep breath. "I think that's killed the mood."

Buffy wrinkled her nose, taking in their surroundings. "Just as well. I guess we should go back in." She stuck out her hand, as much a challenge as a peace offering. "Come on. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it all the way."

Did that mean what he thought it meant? He must have let the astonished hope leaping up within him show in his face, for Buffy's eyes grew suspiciously bright. She took a deep breath of her own, and he could tell she was shakier than she was letting on. "I--I told you I'd never been ashamed to know you. So... I shouldn't be ashamed about... wanting to know you better."

He took her hand, feeling it tremble in his until he gave it a squeeze. She pressed close to him for a moment, holding him with fierce strength while he buried his nose in the crook of her neck and breathed her in. He wasn't fool enough to think this meant smooth sailing ever after, but he was fool enough that, for this moment, he didn't care. She broke away reluctantly, General Buffy again, and hand in hand they went back into the shop to face the enemy. Buffy dropped his hand as the entered, walked to the center of the floor, put both hands on her hips and cocked  
her head at the others.

"Small announcement," she said. "You know how we aren't sure how the loa fits in? Well, make more fitting room--there's now a Chumash bear spirit in the alley." She paused, forefinger pressed to her lips as if remembering something. "Also, I was gonna do the whole secret doomed star-crossed affair thing, but you know what? I've given this a lot of thought, and I just don't have the energy for one of those right now."

Everyone except Willow and Tara looked at her in puzzlement. With an expression of grim determination, Buffy turned, marched back over to Spike, wrapped both arms around his neck, pulled his head down and picked up where they'd left off.

Now _this_ he hadn't expected. Spike broke into an amazed grin as her small warm body pressed against him and his arms went round her--reflex, almost; could you develop a reflex in less than twenty-four hours? Apparently so. Their mouths met with less urgency this time, both of them knowing now for certain that it wasn't the first-last-only, that they had all the time in the world to nip and taste and nibble and explore the really interesting effects you could get with a thirty-four degree difference in body temperature.

"Willow!" Xander and Giles yelled in outraged unison. Tara looked distressed. Anya looked up, shrugged, and went back to counting receipts.

"It's not my fault, it's not my fault!" Willow squeaked, hiding behind the screen of the laptop. "I didn't do anything this time! I promise!"

Buffy pulled back for air, cheeks pink, eyes bright, her heart going at trip-hammer speed; the sound was music. She glared defiantly around the room. "In order: No spell. In my right mind. If he misbehaves, I dust him." Her eyes came home to his, _And that would kill me_ writ so plain in her gaze that his heart wrenched within him in startled pain; did she know what her eyes were saying? "Anything else is nobody's business but ours. Deal. Now that that's out of the way, bear-analyzing time."

Spike looked down at her, a smile lurking about the corners of his mouth. "My, Slayer, you certainly do know how to romance a fellow."

"Wait, wait, wait, you can't just say 'Deal' and leave it at that!" Xander objected. "Is there straddling involved here? Because I absolutely draw the line at straddling."

He'd expected this from Harris. He really had. They'd gotten to tolerate each other over the summer, but Harris could never quite get over the vampire thing, and after Buffy's return Spike had been the recipient of all the frustrated anger he couldn't take out on Willow. One night of chasing through a park wasn't going to bridge that gap. So why was he surprised at how much it stung? "Ah, here it comes." Spike slipped a proprietary arm around  
Buffy's waist and went for the counter-attack. "Is that a bit of the green-eyed monster I hear? The vampire's good enough to cheat at pool with, but I don't want him shagging my Slayer?"

Under other circumstances the shade of purple Xander was turning would have been exceptionally entertaining. "Damn straight! How are we supposed to handle this? Do we say 'Hi, Buffy, congratulations on your new demon lover, and by the way, have you seen a psychiatrist lately?' Or do we do the awkward pretending not to notice what's going on, and try to lure her to the psychiatrist with a trail of jelly doughnuts?" Xander rounded on Giles, who was polishing his glasses so violently it was a wonder he hadn't worn through the lenses. "Giles! Tell her she can't do this!"

The Watcher's face might have been carved from granite. "At what point in this conversation has Buffy been replaced by someone who takes my orders?" He put the glasses back on, studying the two of them. "Buffy--I made it my policy to keep out of your personal life when you were a girl, as long as it didn't interfere with your calling. I see no reason to change that policy now. I won't deny that I find this... most inadvisable. I fear it will end in tragedy--again. But if this is your choice--"

"It is." The two words held every ounce of Summers determination in her, and they were the sweetest things Spike could remember hearing in over a century.

"Then I accept it. As for you--" He looked Spike up and down. "For better or worse, you are not the vampire Angel was. See to it that you remain so. You know to exactly what lengths I'm willing to go to protect her."

Spike nodded slowly. He wasn't positive, but he thought the odds were better than even that he'd just been given a compliment as well as a warning. "Wouldn't expect any less."

Buffy strode over to the table, tugging him along in her wake. "Now. Are we going to discuss demony stuff or argue about my love life?"

Willow waved one hand apologetically. "Um, Buff, your love life _is_ demony stuff."

Buffy considered for a moment, then slipped her arm around Spike in turn and smiled up at him impishly. "So it is. End of argument."


	11. Chapter 11

There was an awkward silence. "Maybe we should take a break from the research," Tara said. Expressions of relief broke out all around the table.

"Great idea." Buffy tightened her arm around Spike's middle with the rebellious glee of a small child bouncing on the good sofa. He couldn't blame her; he had the dizzy feeling that this was all a figment of his overactive imagination. If he pulled her closer, would she disappear? The slight, strong body in his arms remained flesh and blood as he draped both arms round her shoulders, and the rebuff he still half-expected didn't come. Elated, he bent his head, nuzzling her ear. She tensed a little, then leaned into him defiantly, shoulders against his chest, the sweet curve of her ass pressing into his crotch. _Ha ha, I'm touching Buffy! Touch touch touch!_ Felt good. Felt wonderful. Felt like... felt like the mood was making a remarkable comeback. "In fact, I think we should try to find out more about all the, uh, bears and things, and if there's any--" Buffy gasped slightly as his arousal became more evident, straining towards her warmth. "--connections. Spike and I can search--" She cast a quick look at the front door; still sunlight out. "--the tunnels."

Spike nodded. "I'm game." Without further ado Buffy broke for the door to the basement, Spike right behind her.

Willow called after them, "Do you need any he--"

"NO!"

Spike kicked the door shut behind them. Buffy spun around and grabbed him, yanking him down a step or two. They collided on the stairs, hands clutching bodies with white-hot bruising passion, slamming against each other, blind with two years of pent-up need. He caught hold of her waist, hands sliding up under the halter top, stroking, caressing, drawing little whimpering moans from her while her lips and tongue traced patterns of fire down the cords of his neck. Her hands went back to work on the buttons of his fly--good, going to be some serious damage done if something didn't give down there soon. _Warm_ hands, fuck, there was a God. She freed him from the jeans and he gasped in relief, but it was only momentary; her touch made him so painfully hard it was a marvel he didn't come right then and there.

Fresh desire surged up in her, musky and intoxicating, the moment she took him in her hands. Spike staggered for a second, drunk on her scent, caught his balance, and lifted her up bodily. They crashed into the storage shelves at the bottom of the stairs, sending vials of mandrake root and asphodel flying. Buffy braced herself against the shelf. He heard cloth ripping as he pulled her jeans off her hips--didn't care, not when his Slayer was squirming and moaning under his hands, her teeth nipping at his lower lip, her mouth warm, so warm, but nothing compared to the tropical paradise between her thighs. She was wearing some lacy scrap of nothing under the jeans and both layers of cloth were soaked through already; she yanked the underwear aside and reached down to guide him into her.

Then he was sliding into that lovely moist heat in one long sure stroke, borne up in the ocean of her eyes--if the world had stopped turning on its axis, he would not have felt it; if prophesy was fulfilled, he would not have cared. All he knew was that in her body he had returned home at last.

*****

5:00 PM

"Again? Can't--oh. OH..."

"Oh, but you can. Again. And again, and again. Don't know your own strength, Slayer?"

"I--oh, yeeessss. Get in me, _now_. Harder. Didn't know _ your_ strength. Everyone else... got... tired... OH!"

"Rrrrrowwrr... Ah, that's lovely, that is. You've got the prettiest little pink quim, and you're so wet, all for me, so hot and tight... I get hard just breathing you in, you know that?"

"Getting the picture. Nice _big_ picture. God, Spike, you feel so _good_... yeeeesss! That's it! Right there! Yes, yes, YES!!"

6:00 PM

"Do you think they're still up there?"

"Do we give a fuck?"

"Welll..."

"Makes me horny, thinkin' of them clustered around the door, listening for pointers..."

"Everything makes you horny."

"True. Let's not waste it, eh?"

7:00 PM

"Oh, come on, love, you act like you've never seen one before. I know damn well the poof wasn't snipped."

"I know, but we didn't exactly... you know, spend a lot of time looking at each other. It's so... cute. Like a little turtleneck." (a giggle) "OK, a not so little turtleneck."

8:00 PM

"Say it."

"I bloody well will not."

"Say it. You know you want it. You won't get it till you say it."

"Buffy Summers is the Goddess of Head and the owner of the Magic Tongue and I beg her on bended knee to apply her rosy pink lips to my poor abused cock before I fucking explode."

"That's _not_ what I--oh, screw it, it'll do."

9:00 PM

"Are you sure? I've never--"

"Love, I could break the damned thing in two ticks if I wanted to. I don't want to. I like it."

"But it looks like it hurts."

"Oh, yeh, it hurts. Hurts real good. Just keep on--ohfuckingchristYES!"

"Wow. I guess you do like it. What if I... oooh. You know, a girl could get into this..."

11:00 PM

"Buffy? Love? What's wrong?"

"I--don't stop! I'm not crying. I'm not. I--I never knew it could be like this. I--no one ever did that to me before."

"No one...? What, was Commando Boy sodding insane? He had you in his bed for a bleeding year and a half and never...? I'll fly down to Brazil and kill 'im tomorrow... Or better yet, I'll stay here and do it again."

1:00 AM

"Mmmm. William..."

"What?"

"Oh. Sorry. Spike. Spike? Are--"

"No--s'all right. Just... no one ever said that name that way before."

"Hey. I'll say your name any way I like."

"Ah, so now it's my name?"

"Shut up and do me, William."

3:00 AM

"I love you."

"Spike, I..."

"Don't. I know. It's all right. I've just got to say it now and again."

Buffy awoke to the sound of a heart not beating.

In repose, they fit together, an interlocking puzzle in ivory and gold: his nose buried in her hair, his occasional breaths stirring the fine loose strands; her head still pillowed on his shoulder, an unforseen advantage of sleeping with someone whose circulation couldn't get cut off. His arm curled across her body, hand cupping her breast. Her fingers splayed across his chest, savoring wiry muscle layered over bone. She could see the trail of fingernail-welts over the curve of his shoulder, already starting to heal. She watched the flutter of his lashes, startlingly dark against his pale cheek. He looked younger, more vulnerable, in sleep--hair tousled, the lush, almost feminine curve of his lower lip all the more irresistible set against the severe planes and angles of cheek and jaw.

Had she intended to take it this far, this fast? She couldn't remember; skin-to-skin contact with Spike left her brain little more than a cascade of white sparks. She flexed her body experimentally, wincing at all the delicious little aches the movement roused. She was ravenously hungry, in desperate need of a shower, and feeling...

Spike made a little protesting noise, drawing her closer, and she curled into his side; there was a warm spot there, where she'd lain next to him all night. All of this changed nothing, of course. Last night she'd screamed, laughed, wept, made him do the same. They'd touched ecstacy beyond her wildest dreams--and then had a rousing fight over whether or not he got to smoke in bed after touching ecstacy. Some time in the night the glass wall had shattered for good, cutting her to the bone and making her howl with joy at the pain.

She couldn't remember if Angel had breathed in his sleep.

One thing she was going to have to keep in mind if this went on was that wild spontaneous sex in unheated basements was very Blue Velvet and all, but waking up in the unheated basement next to an unheated vampire was just chilly. Was that rag in the corner what was left of her halter top? _Forget the morals of it all, your wardrobe can't afford an affair with Spike._

His arm tightened around her and his eyes blinked lazily open, blue and clear, with a told-you-so smirk that had nothing to do with being a demon and everything to do with being a guy. His fingers began tracing arabesques on her breasts and belly, and she arched into his touch, her mouth seeking his with unerring instinct. After a moment she had to breathe, and forced herself to sit up, casting about for her clothes, whatever was left of them, anyway. "What time is it?"

Spike yawned, (why on earth did someone who didn't breathe yawn?) did a long, slow, crack-every-muscle stretch--and pounced, pulling her down and nibbling her earlobe. _Melting now_. "Buggered if I know. Buggered if I care. C'mere and let me give you a nice thorough shagging."

"Noooooo!" she moaned, not at all convincingly. She squirmed out of his grasp and crouched on hands and knees, surveying the storeroom with alarm. There were pieces of broken glass from the toppled mandrake jars all over the floor, along with splinters from the broken shelf. Amazing that they hadn't sliced themselves to ribbons or accidentally staked Spike. _If we don't happen to be in an alley, by gum, we'll make the place look like one!_ Anya was going to freak. "No touchy! Dawn's probably worried sick--"

Spike caught her ankle and ran the tip of his tongue along her instep. "Dawn's fifteen, not five, and probably thrilled to have a night to herself for a change. 'Sides, Will and Tara'll have told her where we were." He grinned. "Not exactly where we are, I hope."

"Well... oohh... No! If nothing else, I've _really_ gotta pee. And I'm starving."

He sighed and let her go, reaching for his own clothes. "I could use a spot of brekky myself." The grin widened. "Nothing like exercise to work up a healthy appetite."

Buffy, clutching the remains of her halter top to her chest, bit her lower lip. "Spike..."

"Yeh, love?"

"You didn't..."

"Eh?"

"You didn't go all grr. Even once."

He raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"Does that mean..." She felt herself going red. How on earth was she supposed to ask this? "I mean--was--did you... enjoy it?"

He cocked his head to one side and stared at her. "Did I--? That's a damned fool question--there's things a bird can fake, but in case you haven't noticed, I'm not a bird."

She ducked her head. "It's just--whenever Angel got...uh... excited..."

Wrong thing to say. Hurt and irritation swept the look of nostalgic lust off Spike's face in an instant. "Look, Slayer, if this little get-together was about indulging your death wish, take the next sodding bus to L.A. and look up Grand-sire. I don't screw my food."

Buffy flinched. "It wasn't Angel who kept reminding me I wasn't worth a second go!"

She didn't try to keep the bitter edge out of her voice, and got the dubious reward of seeing him flinch in turn. Spike made a disgusted noise and got to his feet. A moment later his hand was tipping her chin up roughly, forcing her to look at him. His winter-blue eyes caught hers, looking right down into the bottom of her soul; was it fair that he, who had none, was so good at reading hers? She felt his fingertips tracing the old bite scars on the side of her neck, and shuddered. He studied her face for a moment, then bent his head. Slowly, methodically, his lips brushed her neck, teasing her--then he bit down, hard, suckling at her throat, that amazingly talented tongue caressing her sensitive skin in the wake of his grazing teeth until she was dissolving under his touch. She was gasping when he drew away, on the verge of another climax, and she could feel him hardening against her. His face was still completely human; he hadn't broken the skin. "Listen," he said, harsh and intense. "Last night was the most amazing experience of my life. Better than the best kill I ever had--if sex was blood I could live off you, Slayer. I'm yours. You and the Bit. In the immortal words of Buffy Summers, deal."

He was still a monster. A beautiful monster, a monster who loved her, her very own leashed and muzzled man-eating tiger. Buffy lifted a hand to his face, stroking his cheek, not caring that her fingers trembled. Nothing had changed--

"Here," he said, handing her his T-shirt. "Looks like this survived the carnage."

\--except that someone, somewhere, had just won that pool.

*****

Tanner sat on a hummock of limestone, rubbing his upper arms with his hands. He was cold. The temperature in the caves was constant, but chill, and his coat was too thin for comfort when sitting still. A few guttering candles dripped wax down the sides of the stalagmites where they were perched--as an attempt to hold back the immense rolling darkness, they were pathetic, but that was not their primary purpose.

The figures huddled around the central altar didn't appear to notice either the cold or the darkness. Skeletal limbs swaddled in rags, eyeless faces turned upwards, they brandished staves adorned with fragments of bone and feathers, their droning chant importuning the attention of something ancient and dark. Tanner didn't understand the words; they were in a language that had died before the first ape stood upright on an African plain. The echoes rolled back and forth across the cavern, creating a polyphony that gnawed its way into the brain, an endless tapestry of sound.

Ganag'sh awruun, ganag'sh hlal  
Raukh al ankhun f'khaeth guih nawrn  
Hauth hauwrug yawva'thir rukh  
Shkaur ri yawkweth f'kruth anih gawrn!  


First One, thou who dwellest in the night places  
Thou who art the darkness between the worlds  
We have made ready the path  
We have opened for thee a doorway.  
The hand of our messenger has fallen  
On the head of thy anointed  
On the head of thy chosen  
Enter in where the dwelling has been prepared.

One by one the chanters dropped out, until only a single ragged voice remained. "Shkaur!" it cried, striking downward with the butt of his staff. Sparks flew from the cavern floor, as if the staff were steel to its flint, and for a moment actinic green light illumined the whole vast space around them, glinting off swags and canopies of flowstone, translucent crenelations, pendant forests of rust and cream and gold. Then it was gone and the darkness rolled in once more, still and cold and overwhelming. The eyeless men stood rigid for a long moment, then lowered their staves, slumping in exhaustion. One of them turned to Tanner, the muscles of its ravaged cheeks twitching with fatigue. "It is done."

"Great. So what about my half of the bargain?" Tanner got to his feet, stiff with long sitting. "I can't keep this together much longer. It was sheer luck we found that poor schmuck under the picnic table." And poor fare the man's mind had been, too--half gone already, as so many of the chronically homeless were. Odds were good he'd remain one of the ones who never left the junkyard camp, one more mouth to feed and back to clothe for those of them who remained able to function.

The eyeless man smiled, perhaps the most unpleasant expression Tanner had ever witnessed. "Your foolish panic has wakened other powers. Their arrival stirs others yet, already made wary by the shifting of the Balance. Complications such as these we needed no part of."

Tanner shrugged. "You pick a crazy guy to do your dirty work, you take your chances." Unease coiled within him even so. He'd been running on the ragged edge of sanity that night, or he'd never have tried that half-assed summoning to begin with. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but he couldn't begin to analyze his own motivations now. The loa were not forgiving masters, and he had no right to beg their protection--yet Ghede had answered. _ Chill black waves flowing from his hands into the Red Witch's skull_. He shivered. "I did what you asked me to. Pay up."

A desiccated chuckle. "Never fear. Your reward is at hand."

*****

"OK, so the spell you used on me--the incantation was Fomorian, right? And no physical components at all?"

Willow, head propped listlessly on her fist, nodded and flipped over another page of _Unnatural Maladies_. Grimacing at the gory illustration of a victim of a Fyarl demon's acid mucous, she skimmed the accompanying text and flipped the page again. "That's right. Just words and hand-wavy stuff. I didn't figure I'd have time for anything fancy while Glory tried to pop my head off."

Tara went back to the diagram she was working on. Willow sneaked a look over her shoulder; it was a more elaborate version of the scribbles she'd been working on yesterday, showing all the component parts of the altar. They'd taken the bus out to Weatherly Park that morning and hunted till they found the isolated picnic table-altar and the scattered remnants of the spell. Tara had sketched the whole thing carefully, and now she was trying out different reconstructions of the patterns formed by the stones and the ritual objects. Willow didn't know what Tara expected to get out of the project; obviously Daniel Tanner's version of the spell wasn't what they needed, but she didn't feel up to arguing about it.

** _ You're not up to much lately._ **

She stared down at the ornate script on the page before her and heaved a sigh. It was a whole big ol' fashioned Scooby research party--well, minus Giles, who'd bowed out, as he did so often these days, to deal with the shipping company which was moving his library back to England. And minus Buffy and Spike, who'd been incommunicado since the previous afternoon. No one had quite gotten up the nerve to knock on the basement door yet. Willow should have been in her element, but she felt fuzzy and unfocused, unable to concentrate. Something inside was dried out, scraped bare, and how long it would take for her inner reservoirs to renew themselves... ugh. She didn't even want to think about that.

Xander and Anya were having an argument over by the counter; eavesdropping on them was more interesting than trying to puzzle out what the author of _Unnatural Maladies_ meant by 'lesions caused by the unmentionable foulnesse practiced among the Fyarl of Bavaria.' They were arguing a lot lately--about the wedding, about money, about anything at all. "Look, it doesn't matter how the bear fits in." Xander sounded edgy and snappish. "We just don't have enough info, so we stick to the mission: find crazy people, catch crazy people, fix crazy people."

A chill worked its way up Willow's spine, as if dark water were rising around her. **_Of course, you realize all this is futile--without a source of power to tap, you won't be able to fix the crazy people without making more crazy people. Every spell has its price._**

_No! That's not so! Well, the price part, yes, but_\-- She looked round at the stacks of books, feeling the dark water rise, a wave of defeat washing over her. There wasn't anything in them that could help, she knew--she'd gone through every single one of them researching the original spell she'd used to cure Tara. The niggling little voice was right. You couldn't draw power out of nowhere. But she'd had a lot of experience in being creative about where she drew it from--work at anything hard enough and you'd find a catch. If you couldn't beat the simulation, reprogram the simulator. Wasn't that what Buffy'd been doing for the last six years?

Anya sniffed. "The last time one of those bears came around, you got cursed with a grotesque sexually transmitted disease. As the person you have sex with, I have a right to be concerned." She unlocked the lid to the front counter display case and arranged a pair of enameled bracers (guaranteed to fend off shark bites) in a prominent position in front of the 'Store Special!' placard. She stood up and surveyed the shelves critically. "Drat. We're out of the lemon meditation candles. Go get me another carton out of storage, Xander."

"Oh, thanks for the reminder! I'm not the one who stirred it up this time." Xander tossed a snide look in the direction of the basement door. "Someone else's parts can fall off. And I am _not_ going down there."

Anya shrugged. "All right, I will." She started off towards the forbidden door.

Xander caught her arm, his voice taking on a note of panic. "You can't go down there!"

"Why not? It's my store."

"Because--because it might be dangerous! What if they left the door to the tunnels unlocked, huh? They haven't come back yet, maybe something got them and maybe it's down there right now about to--"

"Xander," Anya said with commendable patience, "They didn't go into the tunnels. They went down to the basement to have sex. Although I wish they'd gone into the training room instead; there are far fewer breakable items in there, and I know I heard crashing noises. But since the training room has no exit, it would have been obvious that they intended to have sex, and I did notice that Buffy was employing the misdirection you keep talking about. It doesn't work very well. Or maybe she's just not very good at it."

Xander clapped his hands over his ears. "Gnnng."

"Poor Xander," Tara whispered.

Willow wrinkled her brow. "I wonder if he's really upset or if this is some kind of autonomic reflex. If he didn't kick up a fuss it would ruin his reputation. Besides, you know, him and Anya--I suppose technically she's got a soul, but--" _If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. What a boring philosophy_. She tried very hard for Xander's sake, but Anya was just annoying. Nails-on-chalkboard annoying. She speculated idly on the chances of Xander noticing if Anya lost a little mental energy for a good cause. _Bad Willow_.

**_Still_** , said the niggling little voice, **_not a bad idea in theory. You could steal a tithe of energy from many minds to heal one. Who would miss it?_**

The necessary spell flashed into her mind, almost fully-formed. _Eww. No. Where did that come from?_

"I'm surprised it's taken this long," Anya continued blithely. "It's been obvious for some time that Buffy's sexually attracted to him. Spike is pleasant to look at, has well-defined muscles and appears to be exceptionally well-equipped to give her orgasms. Also the two of them have a great deal in common. They both enjoy witty repartee, wearing leather and killing things."

Dawn slammed her book shut, pulled her backpack from beneath the table, and hopped to her feet. "Not that hearing you guys speculate about my sister's sex life isn't oodles and bunches of fun, but I'm getting nowhere and it's almost twelve. I'm supposed to meet Lisa at the mall. Can you tell Buffy when she gets back from her, uh, search that I'm gonna have dinner at Lisa's and--"

"I'm sure Buffy will be back by then," Tara said firmly. "Phone home at six and see what she says."

"Buffy will say be home by ten or face the Slayer's wrath," Buffy said.

Everyone's attention was immediately riveted to the back of the shop, where Buffy stood, wearing yesterday's jeans (somewhat the worse for wear) and Spike's t-shirt. Spike lounged in the doorway behind her, equally rumpled-looking and bare-chested underneath the duster. It was astonishing how the ever-present tension between them was simply gone--evaporated. Spike took in Xander's look of exaggerated horror and Anya's frank appreciation with amused equanimity; Buffy just looked disconcerted to see that everyone was staring at them. Dawn bounced over to her sister (and someone was going to have to tell Dawn that with the way she was growing, getting Dawn-bounced was becoming a little alarming) and hugged her. "This is so great!"

"Ah," Xander said, straight-faced. "I see. We're now looking for a clothes-eating monster."

"You guys haven't been out here since--?" Buffy asked nervously.

"Not at all," Anya assured her. "We left when the noises got too distracting. You'll be paying for everything you broke, of course?"

"She's joking, Buff," Xander said, glaring at Anya.

"Of course." Anya looked quite earnestly upset over the idea that her humor might have been misconstrued. "Except for the paying for breakage part. Oh!" An expression of rapture blossomed over her face. "If the two of you are a couple, I can save money by getting you one Christmas present!"

"Because our tastes are _so_ similar? But I'm getting you and Xander separate presents," Buffy shot back. "No fair."

"Right, no cutting back on the prezzies when you and Harris are the only ones in this merry band with a steady income." Spike leaned over and whispered something into Buffy's ear. She smiled up at him and tugged him down for a kiss that rapidly deepened to the point where shutting the door on them again began to look like a viable option. "I'm going to nip home and get something to drink," the vampire said when they finally broke apart, doing the whole husky-voiced, smouldering-gaze thing. "Later, Slayer." He started back down the stairs, stopped, and leveled a warning finger at Anya. "And yes, I'm coming back for my car, so if you have it towed I'll come hang about through your whole Christmas sale week and harass the paying customers."

Buffy watched Spike go with a little smile, took a deep breath and turned back to the others. "So," she said. "Got something for me to beat up yet?" Not carefree, bouncy, pre-Angelus Buffy; that girl was long gone. But certainly happier than Willow could remember her being since before the whole mess with Riley and vamp hookers, before Joyce Summers had died. _If Spike can do that, then maybe I should be playing matchmaker_. Come to that, Spike had looked pretty darn pleased with the universe, too.

** _Hard to believe it was only three years ago he was threatening to cut your face open with a broken bottle, isn't it? Of course he's harmless now--for the time being, at least--but it's sobering to think any new-risen fledgling could do the same to you now, with your powers at such a low ebb..._ **

Willow fought off a reflexive shudder as the memory of that horrible night in the old factory washed over her afresh--and Spike had been the least horrible part of it, in retrospect. Perhaps that was why she'd been able to let go of the fear and anger towards him so easily: when it came down to it, she'd hurt herself far more than he'd hurt her. Still... she had been afraid, that night. It could never happen to her now--

** _Except, of course, that it just did. At the hands of a mere human hedge-wizard._ **

"You'd better just go looking for crazies," Tara was saying. "Because the leads we have on any of the rest of this stuff are--well, they aren't."

The others didn't notice as Willow rose from the table. She had the eerie feeling that time was slowing as drifted over to the stairs, the earth ceasing its revolutions for her and her alone. Everyone else was frozen in place, too busy talking to Buffy about the unsolvable problem, as if the Slayer could beat it into submission. But it wasn't unsolvable. The solution just wasn't in any of the books down on the lower level. Willow whispered the words that allowed her access to the balcony.

She knew exactly what part of the restricted section of the library to go to, exactly what part of the shelf to reach towards, exactly which book to slip out from its dusty slot, taking care not to disturb the volumes around it. It was small and squat and bound in battered black leather, and any title embossed upon its spine or cover had worn away long since. It was one of a box full of books Xander and Spike had recovered from Doc's apartment over the summer, when they'd searched it for clues to who the mysterious old man--or demon--had been. Most of them had been concerned with necromancy of one sort or another--not surprising, considering that Doc had been an expert on the subject.

Her fingers brushed the greasy leather. This one... this one had proven valuable. She'd found the passages that had inspired her modifications of the Raising spell here, part of the Protocols of Osiris. She'd intended to translate the rest of it at some point, but there just hadn't been time. Quickly, Willow tucked the book under her arm and climbed down the ladder again. She slid the book into her dufflebag and zipped it up. Time lurched into motion again around her.

"--just doesn't seem right somehow," Buffy was saying. "Buffy the Homeless Wino Slayer? Not exactly a fair fight, is it? What do I do, catch them with butterfly nets?"

"Say that again after a pack of them come this close to sucking your brains out," Xander said with great feeling.

"Mm." Buffy didn't look convinced. "All right, we'll get on it. I'm gonna go home and hit the showers or no one will be able to tell me from the crazies."

"Get the mail, will you?" Willow asked. "I forgot to check the box when we left this morning. Oh, and tonight before patrol? There _will_ be dish."

*****

"It goes so well with that eyeshadow!" Lisa peered over Dawn's shoulder at her reflection in the mirror on the counter. Dawn tilted her head this way and that, doubtful.

"You don't think it's too red? But then, Buffy does go for that blood-of-the-innocent look."

"Trust me, it's luscious. She'll love it."

Dawn stuck the lipstick back into its slot on the tester rack and twiddled a few others round to read the names. Raspberry Dew, Cotton Candy... no wonder little kids tried to eat the stuff. She looked around, but there were no clerks in evidence anywhere near the makeup counter. Par for the course. Nordstrom's was festooned with swags of gold and silver crepe and crowded with early Christmas shoppers, and the air was redolent of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and the smell of Department Store: a mingling of perfume, leather, plastic, wool, and fake evergreen scent. "I can't believe they had this stuff out before Thanksgiving," she muttered.

"Are you kidding?" Lisa waved at the nearest display of holiday cheer. "They had it out before Halloween. Here, smell this." She spritzed her wrist and stuck it under Dawn's nose.

"Phhweh. Smells like cantaloupe. I don't think fruit salad is sexy."

"Huh. So much for designer fragrances. On the other hand, mothers aren't supposed to be sexy." Satisfied, she dropped the bottle into her shopping basket and consulted her list. "Got Mom, got Dad... he'll be so thrilled with another tie, but honestly, I have no idea what to get him--Jamie wants that Green Day album..." She hesitated, then choked out in a rush, "Do you think I should maybe send that guy a card or something?"

"What guy?" Dawn asked absently, trying out a slightly less fire-engine shade of lipstick. "Alan?" Forbidden Passion. Oh, yeah, this was it--if nothing else, watching Buffy's face when she read the name was going to be worth it. "Stand right there. Hold it." She took another quick glance around to ascertain that there were still no clerks in sight, and shifted her body so that her back was towards the security camera. One quick flick of the wrist and the lipstick of her choice was in her purse.

"You're so good at that." Lisa was frankly envious. "I'd totally panic. No, the--the vampire guy. He did kind of save my life."

"It's a knack," Dawn said, giving her hair a careless flip. She _was_ good. Even Spike said so, and he was the professional. "Sure, send him a card. I think he's got a post office box, I'll see if I can get the number. If not you can leave it at my place and I can pass it on."

Lisa nodded, still a little red about the ears. After the way Megan had been drooling all over Spike, maybe she was afraid he'd take it the wrong way. Little chance of that considering recent developments.

She was glad she'd already had plans with Lisa for this weekend; it kept her from obsessing to much about those recent developments. She was happy for her sister and for Spike, of course, but she couldn't help worrying about how this would change everything. She's wanted this--wanted the two people she loved most to come together, wanted their weird little almost-family to finally coalesce into something real. Sure, it was silly to think that Spike would move in and he and Buffy would show up together for Parent-Teacher Night, but the fact that there was now a solid, nameable connection between them was reassuring. From _This is Spike, the dead guy who hangs around a lot_ to _This is Spike, my sister's boyfriend_ was a big step. Sister's boyfriends got to come over for Christmas and didn't have to skulk around in the bushes with a beat-up box of chocolates on birthdays.

Still, it was hard not to be nervous. Every change over the past year had been one for the worse. Change was bad. So naturally something awful had to be lurking over the horizon to mess up this seeming good news. She just wasn't going to think about it. "Men's clothing next?" Dawn asked. "I want to get Xander just one decent shirt and I'm gonna have to pay for that. Oh, and we have to stop at Williams and Sonoma, I know Tara wants some weird egg-strangler kitchen device." Which she wasn't going to be able to afford, most likely. She had a Williams and Sonoma shopping list and a K-Mart budget. Which made it practically noble to take a five-fingered discount on a few things, since they weren't for her. Right?

They set out for Men's Casual, navigating the maze of clothing racks and dodging displays of elegantly-dressed mannequins tastefully disporting themselves amidst piles of fake snow. Neither girl noticed the man in the dark suit step out from behind one of the mirrored pillars and start to follow them.


	12. Chapter 12

The shadows were growing long when Tara arrived back at the Summers home. She slid her key in and discovered that the front door was already unlocked. She frowned. Dawn wouldn't be back from Lisa's until the very last strike of ten if past experience were any guide, and she'd left Willow at the Magic Box. In Sunnydale, it was sometimes easy to forget about the mundane dangers of burglary, but the VCR would be just as gone whether smashed by a rampaging demon or stolen by an ordinary human being desperate for drug money. At least it sounded like Buffy was downstairs; she could hear the muted babble of the TV. "Buffy?"

"M'in here," came a voice from the living room.

Buffy sounded different, the overwhelming determination and confidence of the previous day leached out of her voice. She sounded, in fact, small and sad and lost. Tara set her backpack down and shot the deadbolt behind her as she came in. She walked into the living room, where Buffy sat in the middle of the couch, wrapped up in her bathrobe, damp hair straggling round her shoulders. The room was dark save for the phosphor glow of the TV. All the curtains were drawn. The wintery afternoon sunlight was nowhere near strong enough to penetrate the gloom. Buffy was cradling a decimated carton of chocolate chip ice cream in her lap and staring at the television as if her life depended on it. The distant, detached expression of the last month was nowhere in evidence. Her lower lip trembled slightly and her eyes were liquid with emotion.

Ordinarily Tara would have found that encouraging, but that the emotion was prompted by the Weather Channel scrolling a list of high temperatures for the day in each of the fifty states was a little worrisome. "Are you busy?" Obviously not, but... "I wanted to talk to you privately about--"

Buffy smiled lopsidedly and jammed her spoon into the middle of the slowly melting remnants of her ice cream. "So you're the first up, huh? I guess I was expecting this." She summoned up the determined look again. "Yes, I know exactly what I--I..." Her voice broke and she burst into silent, quivering tears.

Tara half-tripped over the corner of the coffee table getting to the couch. "Buffy--what's the matter?" Would asking if this were Spike-related (and what else could it possibly be?) make things better or worse? She took a seat on the arm of the couch. "Are y-you--"

"I'm f-fine--" A fresh bout of sobs overtook Buffy, and Tara held her shaking shoulders for several minutes until they subsided. At last Buffy took a deep gasping breath and straightened up, wiping her reddened eyes on the sleeve of her robe. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me." She looked down at her lap as if she hoped for answers in the rivulets of melting ice cream. "I felt great when I got home, and I went up to take a shower, and came down here to see what the forecast was, and..." She gulped a little. "I just happened to look at the picture." She waved at the TV, and for a second Tara was confused; then she realized that Buffy was referring to the little gold-framed photo of Joyce Summers sitting on top rather than to the screen. "I miss Mom."

Tara had long ago finished mourning her own mother's death, but there were times and circumstances which could still make her eyes ache and the back of her throat grow taut. "That's normal," she said. "It's only been a couple of months for you. The rest of us have had longer to...adjust."

"She hated me being the Slayer, did you know?"

That was something Tara never suspected. "Did she? She always seemed to take it so gracefully."

Buffy gave a rueful little laugh. "When she first found out she told me I wasn't welcome in her house if I kept it up. Of course I kinda picked the worst possible time to tell her about it--Spike had just offered to help me take down Angelus." Tara blinked; she hadn't known that Spike had been in on that. Buffy twiddled the spoon around in the ice cream. "Mom got better with it. I wish now I'd told her from the start. It would have made a lot of things so much easier... all the trouble I got into at school, explaining Angel..." She sighed. "Maybe not. Mom never liked him, even before she found out he was a vampire."

Tara wondered if it was safe to turn off the TV, or at least change channels. "I never would have guessed--about your mom, I mean. She always got along so well with Spike."

"I know. Irony much? My mother hates my one true love and invites my mortal enemy in for cocoa." Her eyes softened, the grey-green going misty. "And Spike really liked her. I'd come home from the dorm to visit sometimes and find him over here with her, talking about those dumb soaps or whining about Dru. He'd even listen to her stories about the gallery and pretend to be interested. I wish--I wish she were still here." Her lower lip was trembling again. "I wish I could talk about this with her. She'd probably freak--she liked Spike, but she was so happy when Angel left and I started dating Riley. A nice, human guy. Someone I could have a so-called normal life with." A snort. "That turned out well."

"Normal lives are over-rated."

"I keep telling myself that. It's just weird to hear someone agree with me."

Tara shrugged. "I grew up liking girls in a small town. If you think my family was down on witches, you should have heard Dad's opinions on, quote, uppity dykes." Buffy looked startled. _Didn't think I knew that word, did you? I know a lot of things._ Tara looked over at the other woman, debating her next words. "Buffy... what I said before about why you were kissing Spike--or doing anything else to Spike--not being my business, I meant it. It doesn't--can I have some of that ice cream?"

"Sure." Buffy handed her the spoon.

"Thanks." She took a spoonful and licked the drips off. Not butter pecan, but it would do. "Whatever's between you and Spike doesn't change anything about the way I look at you. You're a grown-up, and besides that, you're a--" She paused, trying to make sure she had the right word. "--responsible person. One of the most responsible people I know. I know you fight it a lot, but when it comes down to it I've never seen you back away. So whatever you've decided to do with your life... I can't believe that it's anything that will hurt others. And whether or not you hurt yourself, or-or Spike--that's your risk to take, and his."

Buffy buried her face in her hands for a second, then straightened and tucked the strands of water-darkened hair behind her ears. "Thank you. God, I'm so messed up!" She wiped her nose. "I've been sitting here for two hours and one minute I'm high as a kite and Spike's the best thing that ever happened to me, and the next minute I'm completely convinced that I'm insane. Hence, ice cream therapy, only partially successful. I'll be OK. I think." She turned on Tara with eyes full of panicky intensity and grabbed her arm. Tara suppressed a wince. "Don't tell Will about this, please--keep it a private meltdown? She's already so worried about whether or not I'm happy or sad or--I slept with Spike. I know it's crazy. I mean, not completely dense, here! How do I explain to Dawn's caseworker that she can't meet my new boyfriend today because he tends to burst into flames? Oh, my God. I called him my boyfriend. What am I thinking? How can I think when he's being all--all Spike at me!? I--"

Tara grabbed the spoon, dug it into the carton of ice cream, and shoved it into Buffy's mouth. Buffy's eyes bugged out at the sudden chill. She held her breath for a good ten seconds, let it out in an ungraceful through-the-nose snort, and with a supreme effort of will, swallowed. Tara watched her. "Are you OK for a minute?"

She gave Tara a watery smile. "Uh. Yeah. Thanks. No guarantees for the minute after that, though. It's all been so--so flat since I got back, like nothing touches me." She caught her lower lip in her teeth. "But when I touch him... everything makes sense. I feel like I fit into the world again. Even if it hurts." There was a look of concentrated wonder in those grey-green eyes, and Tara got the feeling that she was never again going to see Buffy this unguarded. "Have you ever felt like that?"

Tara thought of Willow, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a pile of books. "Yes. Yes, I've felt like that."

Buffy nodded. "So does that cover what you wanted to talk to me about?"

Tara's mouth twitched into a smile. "Not even close. I wanted to talk to you about Willow."

"Oh." Buffy's ears went a little red, to match her nose. "I am Buffy the Walking Ego, hear me roar. What about Will?"

Tara dropped her eyes to her hands. "I left her at the Magic Box--"

"Is that safe, considering what she came up with the last time you left her alone at the Magic Box?" Buffy asked in lighter tones.

Unhappiness welled up inside her, and Tara nodded. "Very safe. That's what I needed to talk to you about. You're counting on Willow to come up with a spell to cure these people, and that--th-that may not be possible."

A small crease appeared between Buffy's brows. "You mean, there may not be a spell that can do the job? But Wills had an idea just before Spike and I, uh, left yesterday. Didn't it pan out?"

"It's not that--Willow may be able to create a working spell, I don't know. The problem is..." This was proving harder than she'd anticipated; there was a dreadful sense of betrayal in telling Buffy this without Willow's knowledge. "I don't think she'll be able to cast it. Bringing you back the way she did--the Raising was an incredibly powerful spell. Normally it's performed by a circle of five or more adepts, and powered by at least ten sacrifices, human and vampire. Willow got around all that, using Dawn's blood and Spike's soul." As much as Tara had disapproved of the spell, she had to admit that Willow had crafted it brilliantly--in concept, at least; as happened too often for comfort, Willow's execution had contained a few flaws. "But that means that a lot more of the power had to come from the caster--Willow. That would have been draining enough, but then the spell went wrong. She poured every bit of magic in her into closing that portal."

"Right," Buffy said, with an understanding nod. "And she's been recuperating ever since."

"No." Tara's voice sounded wretched in her own ears. "That's the trouble. It's been a month, and she's showing no signs of recovery at all. She can cast simple spells, but she burns out almost immediately. I mean, she blew herself out for the day opening a door. When Tanner grabbed her, she had nothing left." Each word grew heavier on her tongue, but she forced them out anyway. "It could be months before she recovers. Or years. Or... maybe never. I just don't know. But I'm pretty certain she's not going to be up to casting a spell to restore the sanity of a dozen or more people any time soon."

Buffy's expression flickered from worried to grim as she spoke, and Tara surmised that _Oh, poor Will!_ was doing mortal battle with _Hah, serves her right!_ in Buffy's head. "Oh. Wow. I never realized... great. We can't just let these guys run wild and free. Oooh, wait!" She gave an excited little bounce. "This Tanner person's only dangerous because he's a wizard of some kind--is there a way to short-circuit _his_ magical talents? So he won't be able to cast the crazy-making spell?"

"Maybe... some kind of curse?" Tara rubbed her mouth, frowning. "I hate messing around with curses, though. You pretty much have to leave the target an out when you construct it, and when they find it--and sooner or later they usually do--it always comes back to get you."

Buffy made a face. "Mmm... you should really have a talk with some gypsies of my acquaintance."

"Maybe a geas. Those are tricky, but they're not malevolent. It'll have to be something that I stand a chance of casting on my own."

"Does Willow..."

Tara sighed and shook her head. "I know she knows she's not getting better, and I know she's scared. We haven't talked about it much. I just... I don't want to come off all 'I told you so!' She's feeling miserable enough about it already." She scraped up the last of the ice cream. "Now that we've had dessert I guess I'd better get dinner started. Willow will be home soon." She couldn't afford to pay Buffy much rent, so she liked to make up the difference in other ways, and besides, she was the only really good cook of the four of them. Buffy attacked the job as though planning a meal were the culinary equivalent of the Battle of Gettysburg, Willow only baked when she was feeling guilty about something, and Dawn... "Um... what do you want to do with that leftover hot dog-macaroni-ketchup casserole?"

Buffy stuck a finger down her throat. "The usual. Pack it up and smuggle it off to Spike."

"You hate him that much, huh?"

Buffy snickered, got to her feet and started for the stairs. "I don't care what he claims, anyone who can eat Dawn's cooking and enjoy it is not possessed of working taste buds." She ran a hand through her damp hair. "Ooh, look at the time. If I want to be ready for patrol by six I'm going to have surrender to the sinister allure of blow-drying." She headed for the stairs and stopped on the lowest step, hanging off the bannister. "Do you need help with dinner?"

"No, that's fine," Tara assured her. "Not like I'm cooking for twenty. It's just going to be hamburgers tonight."

"Coolness. Hey--make an extra one for me for after patrol, OK? Or maybe two. I think we're going to be hungry."

*****

Xander squinted against the late afternoon sun as he trudged through the graveyard, examining the neat columns of figures on the bill Anya had given him. _Shelf, storage, six-foot, one, $79.95. Chest, mahogany, 3 cu. ft. cap., one, $244.95. Jars, storage, 1 qt., twelve, $2.99 ea. Jars, storage, 8 oz., twenty-four, $1.99 ea. Bottle, djinni for the use of, one, $24.95. Djinni, one, priceless... _

He'd devoted a sizeable portion of the afternoon to helping Anya clean up the basement and forcing himself not to speculate on his eventual fate had any of his long-ago Buffy-fantasies ever come to fruition. He'd survived one night with a Slayer, but he had no illusions that 'survived' was not the operative word in describing his tryst with Faith, and she'd been playing nice... for Faith. No, best just close his eyes and think of baseball, and not about what a pair of inhumanly strong people in the throes of passion could possibly have been doing to leave a head-sized hole in a cement-block wall...

He crumpled up the bill and stuffed it in the pocket of his slacks, trying to ball up his resentment with it. He and Anya'd had another fight before he'd given in and consented to run this hopeless errand. In the unlikely event that Spike consented to pay for the damages, ten to one the money to do so would be liberated from Xander's own pockets, and Anya knew damned well that Buffy could barely afford to keep her utility bills paid. _Let's face it, their combined assets are about enough to go down to the corner and buy a stick of gum._

_Their assets?_ Ugh, had he actually started thinking of Spike and Buffy as a _them_? He was supposed to shudder at this point, but no one was there to see him do it, and the truth was he didn't know exactly how to feel. That was mildly disturbing. Vampires = Bad was the cornerstone of his philosophy of life, had been for the past six years. See vampire, stake vampire. Very simple, until Angel came along with his anomalous soul and his brooding cow eyes and his Neanderthal brow and his air of mystery and danger, and all of a sudden Buffy was in love with him, and he was an exception. Until exceptional Angel lost the soul, killed Jenny, kidnaped Dawn, and left Buffy a walking shadow of herself. Xander kicked a tombstone in passing, a bit harder than he'd intended, and bit back a yelp as a stab of pain penetrated his work boots. Despite the horror of it all Xander hadn't been able to help but feel that the world was back on kilter: Vampires bad.

Spike should have been easier to deal with. He wasn't any kind of exception. He was your standard issue bloodsucker, sans soul, sans conscience, sans remorse. Up until last fall Spike had made no bones about the fact that he hated them all and would return to trying to kill them the moment something happened to the chip in his head. Spike = Bad, If Occasionally Useful.

Xander wished that it were easier to remember that these days, that he didn't keep falling prey to unexpected moments of sympathy for the Bleached Wonder, or that Buffy hadn't looked so contented earlier, and not in that sappy, spell-induced way, either. He couldn't say that he liked the vampire, and it was for damn certain that Spike didn't like him, but they'd gotten used to each other over the last year, and familiarity bred... something that made the two of them not completely disinclined towards one another's company. If they spent most of their time snapping at one another, well, everyone needed a hobby.

It lacked several hours till sunset, but the crypt was already shrouded in purple shadow, thanks to several strategically planted cypresses. Xander glanced at the windows; a few candles glowed, but there was no movement behind them. Normally Spike was up and about at this hour, watching television or doing some mysterious vampire thing. He banged perfunctorily on the door to the crypt and then gave it a shove, rattling the chain--what was the good of having a padlock, he thought, if Spike never locked the damned thing? Half the demon population of Sunnydale out to skin him, and anyone could just walk in. The vampire had the brains of a kumquat. He entered the crypt and looked around, then yelled, "Hey! Dead Man Walking! Getcher undead ass up here! Got something for you!"

After a few minutes the sound of booted feet on the stairs echoed up from below, and Spike's pale head appeared out of the opening leading to the lower level. Xander blinked as Spike's shoulders emerged; he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt in vibrant scarlet over his customary black t-shirt, a style Spike hadn't affected since he'd shrunk the last one he'd owned in Xander's washing machine almost two years ago. He was carrying a couple of moldy-looking books in the crook of one arm and tucking a small, oddly-shaped object into his shirt-pocket.

"Holidays coming up," the vampire drawled in response to Xander's unasked question. "I'm feeling festive." He tossed the books down on a table and looked Xander up and down with a belligerent smirk. "My, don't we look all splotchy and possessive! Come to deliver the obligatory touch-her-and-I'll stake-you speech? Snap it up, then, Harris, I've got things--and people--to do tonight." He strutted up to Xander, the smirk growing even more obnoxious. "Or do we fancy fisticuffs? Little punch in the nose to make us feel extra manly? Sorry, that's the Slayer's private preserve, but tell you what--I'll give you a free shot at the rest of the phiz."

Xander's fingers twitched fistwards. Screw moments of sympathy; once an evil soulless bastard, always an evil soulless bastard. He rocked back on his heels and stared down at Spike (and how annoying was it that it had taken a year for him to realize that the undead jerk was shorter than he was?) and savored the fact that it didn't matter that his merely human strength would make about as much impact on Spike's jaw as throwing beanbags; unlike those poor crazy saps, Xander knew how to throw a punch and how to dodge one. He could just keep hitting until Spike broke or his knuckles did. Or better yet, grab one of the bits of faux-Gothic statuary scattered around the crypt and pound the asshole's skull in. And Spike wouldn't be able to do a damned thing about it; if he tried he'd be knocked on his ass, brain-fried courtesy of the U.S. Army--God bless the U.S.A. In fact, he could do anything he wanted to Spike...

...And Spike knew it. He could see it in the vampire's eyes, bravado covering the wincing anticipation of the blow to come, the blow he couldn't fight off, and not just because of the chip. The same look, almost, he'd seen in the mirrors of the boys' restroom before a hundred confrontations with whichever bully wanted to knock Xander Harris's block off that week. The look which meant that if you couldn't avoid the pain, you'd damned well take it on your own terms.

Xander kept his expression blank. "Nah. I've got something way worse than that." He reached into his pocket and saw Spike tense, real fear flickering into his eyes--was there really a stake in there? Slowly, Xander drew the bill out and handed it to the vampire. "Paid in full by the end of January, buster. Or Anya'll hand it over to a demon bill collector."

Hah. He'd floored a vampire. Add that to the Harris resume. Spike stared at the bill, then back at Xander, then back at the bill, the fact that Xander wasn't going to beat the shit out of him slowly seeping through his skull. He pulled a half-empty pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, from behind whatever it was he'd stuck in there on the way upstairs, tapped one out, lit it on the nearest candle-flame, and took a cool-restoring drag. He held up the note and waved it. "Thanks, Harris. I've been thinking of rolling my own, and this is the perfect size."

"You think I'm joking about Anya and money?"

Spike snorted smoke. "Oi, just beat me up yourself, won't you? Easier all around."

Xander coughed, a snide comment about the cigarettes on the tip of his tongue, and then realized that there was far more smoke in the air than could be accounted for by Spike's bad habits or a few cheap candles. Trading looks of confusion, the two of them headed for the crypt door. The diffuse afternoon light dimmed further as they reached it, to the point that Spike risked several steps outside. He looked up, almost losing his cigarette as his jaw dropped. "Bloody hell." Xander shoved past him and tilted his own head back, following the vampire's stunned gaze upwards.

It must have been a hundred feet long. It had no wings, but it rode the wind nonetheless, a sinuous river of gold-rimmed scarlet scales undulating across the sky, blotting out the sun. Five-clawed talons slashed the air. Its be-whiskered and horned head lashed from side to side, trailing fantastic streamers and filaments of silver and gold. Smoke rolled from its flaring nostrils and the immense goggle eyes rolled downwards as the creature spotted them and paused in mid-air, absurdly graceful. The filaments at the end of its snout twitched; it opened its fanged maw and a voice like a striking gong, brassy and ringing and deep enough to make the ground beneath their feet shiver in sympathy, rolled over the graveyard.

It hovered, head cocked as if awaiting an answer. Xander and Spike stood there dumbstruck. The creature gave a heavy, disgusted snort, the scent of its breath like burning metal on the breeze, and then it was gone. Spike jumped back into the shadow of the crypt door as a few small sunbeams penetrated the cypress-shadows.

"What the _hell_ was that?" Xander finally croaked out.

Spike took his cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled a shaky stream of smoke. "Buggered if I know. I never did learn Chinese."

*****

"So?" Willow asked, taking a plate from the dishrack and polishing it with the Hello Kitty dishtowel. Across the kitchen Tara was wrapping up leftover hamburgers in foil and putting tomato slices and shredded lettuce into Tupperware bowls.

Buffy was concentrating on getting the burnt cheese off the skillet, scrubbing hard with the copper mesh pad. "A needle pulling thread?" She was not only in the best mood Willow could remember seeing her in since her return, she was dressed to slay in a dark pleated knee-length skirt and a cream-gold blouse--part of her office drag, Willow knew, but jazzed up with a slim gold belt and matching necklace, displayed to advantage by a few more unbuttoned buttons than most office dress codes would have let her get away with. How was it, Willow wondered, that Buffy could make the cheapest, tackiest accessories look like a million dollars, while she still gave off an aura of plaid jumpers and goofy hats no matter what she wore? It was an alien plot, had to be.

"No, doofus. So, you and Spike. Things are moving kind of, um, fast, aren't they?" Understatement of the year; was it only two days ago that Buffy'd declared the whole thing impossible?

"I guess. I've known Spike way longer than anyone else I've slept with." Buffy applied more elbow grease to the skillet, and for a second Willow was sure she was going to get a polite brush-off. She slid the plate on top of the stack in the cupboard, watching her friend with worried eyes. Maybe she was being too pushy. Once upon a time she wouldn't have had to push at all; Buffy would have been bursting to discuss new developments in her love life with her. Buffy hadn't shown any interest in girl talk in a month of Sundays, even before her death--she'd completely clammed up about the whole fiasco with Riley, and Willow sometimes suspected that whether she admitted it or not, Buffy was still a tiny bit uncomfortable with the idea of her and Tara and S-E-X.

They'd promised each other no secrets, hadn't they? The inner voice she couldn't seem to shut up snipped, **_Right after the last time Spike nearly tore the whole gang apart_**. Not a constructive thought. Why was she in such a pissy mood today? She'd gotten that great idea for revamping the transference spell, and she'd gotten the book she needed out of the Magic Box safely. She stopped herself from throwing an uneasy glance over at her duffle, currently languishing in a corner of the Summers' kitchen. The book was still there. There was no reason for anyone to suspect she'd taken it.

"I'm sorry, Buff, if you're not comfy talking about it--"

"No, it's OK. It's just been so long since I had anything to dish about, I've forgotten all the tribal customs." She stood with one hand resting lightly on the hot water tap, contemplating the drifting archipelagos of soapsuds in the sink with a little smile curving her lips.

Putting away another plate, Willow asked, "Sparkage, then?"

Buffy toyed with her necklace for a moment, trying hard to suppress the smile and not succeeding very well. "Maybe," she replied, evasive. "Oh, who am I kidding, enough sparkage to send the Sunnydale power grid into epileptic fits. You remember when Riley and I got caught at that party at Lowell House?"

"Hard to forget the great Summers-Finn Boinkfest of '00."

Buffy rolled her eyes and turned the tap on, rinsing out the skillet. "It's a little like that. Except, you know, not a magical compulsion, and without the freaky sex-poltergeists draining us. And it feels about a hundred times better, and a hundred times scarier. And Spike's a lot more, uh, imaginative than--okay, it's nothing like that at all. Last night was so intense--"

Willow's eyebrow went up. "Is this, like, meeting-with-Angel-that-you-won't-talk-about intense?"

Buffy flicked soapy water at her. "No. It was like--imagine the only ice cream you ever had in your life was vanilla. And it's good. You like the vanilla. Yay, vanilla! But then one day someone hands you a great big ol' butterscotch ripple sundae. With extra hot fudge and whipped cream and a cherry on top." She held the skillet up to the light for inspection, then set it on one of the stove burners to air-dry. "And then tells you that there are seven zillion _more_ flavors still to try, and he owns a Baskin Robbins."

"And you're not worried about... all the stuff you were worried about two days ago anymore?"

"I'm terrified." The words were a flat statement of fact. Buffy flipped the damp sponge into the air and caught it. "But night before last--I could have lost you, or Tara, or Xander, or Dawn. Or Spike. Who knows what'll happen tomorrow? Last time I checked, still a Slayer with a short expiration date, and dead bodies tend to happen in my vicinity." For a second her eyes were haunted, though her voice remained flippant. "Besides, sex changes everything. Probably the next time we see each other it'll be all weird and uncomfortable and--"

The approaching growl of the motorcycle rattled the panes of the kitchen window slightly, rising to a crescendo and then dying away with a cough as it pulled into the driveway. Buffy stood on tiptoe and twitched the curtains aside to peer out into the blue-grey dusk. "It's Spike!" she said, a little breathless, as if she knew hordes of people who were likely to turn up on motorcycles and its being Spike was a wonderful surprise.

"Is he wearing the coat?" Willow asked, straight-faced.

Buffy gave her a suspicious look. "Of course he is. OK, I'm out of here. We'll do a standard pass over Rolling Green and Eastside Memorial, and then see if we can rake up any leads on Tanner and his band of Merry Men. I'll phone at ten-thirty to see if Dawn's home. I'll probably be home around two."

She pulled the stopper out of the sink and dried her hands, then made a quick detour into the living room to grab a couple of stakes from the weapons chest behind the couch. Willow followed her, lagging a bit, but getting there in plenty of time to see Tara open the front door in the middle of Spike's over-enthusiastic leaning on the doorbell. Buffy straightened up, tucking the stakes into her coat pockets.

Spike stood in the doorway, wearing the coat, which had obviously been cleaned up and mended since its encounter with the pyracantha bush. He looked rather more dressed-up than usual--besides the red overshirt he'd made an attempt to un-scuff the toes of his boots, and he was wearing a couple of those big gaudy silver rings, like the death's-head one he'd given Buffy under the influence of Willow's spell of two years past--Spike's taste in jewelry was an aesthetic train wreck between goth-punk and the Victorian conviction that too much was never enough. He looked slightly self-conscious until he took in Buffy's attire, and a slow grin spread across his face. "Dressed for action, I see. Sorry, Slayer, the bike doesn't come with a side-saddle."

"How cute," Willow whispered to Tara. "It's a slay date." Tara poked her in the ribs.

Buffy sashayed over to the door and stood nose-to-chin with him. She put her hands on her hips and gave him a coolly superior smile in return. "I used to slay like this all the time. Just remember, anything you can do I can better--and while wearing high heels."

Spike's arms slid through the crooks of her elbows and round her waist as if drawn by magnets. "Really?" He dropped his head a fraction and whispered something in her ear.

Buffy's cheeks flushed, but there was challenge in her voice. "Try me. Come on, Spike, time's wasting."

He offered her an arm, and after a second's hesitation she took it. Vampire and Slayer strolled arm in arm down the porch steps, laying claim to the night and looking at one another with unabashed hunger in their eyes.

** _ Beautiful, both of them. And deadly. They have power._ **

There were times, when she was deep in the casting of a spell, when the world fell away and Willow saw everything as patterns and auras of magic. The spellsight overtook her now, and she saw, not the small lean man and the smaller slim woman, but figures of flame: Spike's demon-soul dark as midnight, shot through with the gold and scarlet of human desire, Buffy's human one bright as noon, though the brightness could not conceal the dark currents of power which marked her as something other than merely human. A crown of crackling blue sparks arced around the shadow-Spike's head--the chip?

The voice whispered in her mind **_Ironic, is it not, that these two whose power was thrust upon them, she unwilling and he unknowing, should outstrip you, who were born to wield it?_**

Willow blinked and shook her head, hard, and vision returned to normal; it was only Spike and Buffy disappearing round the hedge in the direction of the driveway, Spike starting to tell Buffy about something he and Xander had seen in the cemetery. "Spike!" He turned, questioning. "You be good to her, or--"

He cocked his head to the side, amused. "You'll stake me?"

"No. I'll tell Xander about your deepest, darkest secret." She ran the tip of one index finger up the bridge of her nose.

Spike went a shade paler, if that were possible, and his hand made an abortive movement towards the breast pocket of his shirt. "You wouldn't, you vicious little--bloody hell, you would! What do you lot do, hang about dreaming up ways to torture me?"

Willow smirked at him. "Like you haven't done the same to us?"

He considered for a moment, then smirked back. "It's a fair cop."

"What?" Buffy asked, extending a curious hand towards his pocket. "What's in there?"

Spike captured her hand and strode towards the motorcycle. "Nothing, pet, let's us just go kill off a few of my friends and relatives, shall we?" A moment later the motorcycle rumbled to life, and then they were gone, roaring away into the darkness.

"What was that?" Tara asked, slipping an arm around her waist.

"Just a little vampire blackmail," Willow said with a satisfied smile. "The punishment should fit the potential crime. I've still got a shovel with Riley's name on it in my Dad's toolshed." She leaned into her lover's shoulder and sighed. "Guess that blows the 'next time we meet will be awkward and weird' theory. I just want it to be all better, now. I want to know she's happy. If this whole thing with Spike is just some weird self-flagellation thing because she hates being alive again--"

"I don't think it is. But it's still Buffy's decision," Tara said firmly. "You brought her back, but it's Buffy's life, not yours. Personally," she slipped a hand under Willow's blouse and ran her fingers teasingly along her ribs, "I think your life has enough exciting parts to keep you occupied."

Willow laughed and kissed her on the nose. "I consider myself chastised."

Tara nuzzled her back. "We've got the whole evening to ourselves," she whispered, sliding her hand higher. "I could chastise you a little more."

For a moment Willow wavered. "I should really work on my English term paper," she said, pulling away. "I really slacked off my classes after Halloween, and I've got to catch up. I was going to head over to the university library and see if that new biography of Gertrude Stein was in yet. I won't stay out too late. You want to come along?"

That was a calculated risk. Dawn wouldn't be home for hours, but Willow knew that responsible, level-headed Tara would want to be sure that someone was home to answer the phone in case of emergencies. And just as she'd expected, Tara looked wistful, but shook her head. "No, I should stay. I've got homework I can work on here."

Retrieving her duffle from the kitchen corner, Willow slung it over her shoulder, feeling the chill electric tingle of the book inside even through the layers of fabric. "I'll be back before you know it," she promised, and set off into the deepening night.


	13. Chapter 13

Downtown Sunnydale on a Saturday night, an island of small-town ambience in the ocean of So Cal suburbia. Main Street, lit up with the glitter and sparkle of Christmas lights, hosts the usual good-time Saturday crowds augmented by hordes of shoppers. The Bronze, the Espresso Pump, the Sun Theater, all packed. Go further downtown, towards the docks, and the streets grow narrower, darker, and the seedier allure of the Fish Tank and the Purple Onion draw their own circles of clientele.

If you are human, you keep to the light, stick with the swirling mass of high school kids with oversized jeans and backwards baseball caps, college kids in fashionable piercings and haircuts that had been out of date in L.A. for weeks, adults young and old grabbing the bit in their teeth and throwing over the traces of the workweek. If you are human, and have lived in Sunnydale any amount of time, you know something is out there in the dark, beyond the sodium glow of the street lamps. You join in the buzz of talk and ever-so-slightly-nervous laughter and hope that by refusing to name it, you can ward it off.

If you aren't human, you keep to the darkness, stalking the mortal herd with predatory precision. You drift along the edges of the crowds, silent as the mist that legend said you could turn to--legend was wrong, but who needed special effects when you had strength and speed and senses far beyond the mortal? There's nothing human which could match you, much less best you. Scout the sidewalks, looking for tonight's victim. The blue-haired woman with the armful of packages? The lanky young man with the soul patch and the air of existential discontent? Or there, in the alleyway ahead, the young couple necking heedlessly against the wall, hands and mouths all over each other, lost in a carnal fog?

If you are a vampire, you smile to yourself and glide forward across the gum-pocked pavement in front of the theater, cruel delight welling deep inside as you imagine your hand falling on the man's shoulder. You imagine his look of shock, the woman's terror as you tear his jugular open, the fear in their eyes as delicious as the blood in their veins. You suit action to thought, reaching out; but before your hand comes to rest upon its target, the man in the alley turns to face you in a swirl of black leather. His golden eyes and ridged brow and sharp-fanged, arrogant smile mirror your own, the only reflection you will ever know.

If you are a vampire, you realize, too late, that there is only one heartbeat to be heard between them. You start to back away, thinking that you have intruded upon the other's kill; but there is no blood on his mouth, and his hand, cold as your own, closes about your wrist with a strength that exceeds your fledgling prowess by a century or more, pinning you in place. The delicate pink tip of the woman's tongue darts across her kiss-swollen lips, and her eyes are bright with excitement, not fear.

If you are a vampire, you look upon the faces of the Slayer and her traitorous consort and know that you've made a terrible, terrible mistake. As the wooden stake plunges into your chest, there is one moment of needle-sharp, achingly brilliant pain which lasts forever, the forever you were promised when your sire first placed your dying lips to the wound at his breast and bade you suck.

And then you are gone.

*****

Buffy nudged the pile of dust at her feet with a disdainful toe, and the evening breeze finished dispersing the remains of the vampire who'd attacked them. Spike slouched against the brickwork, watching her with an admiring half-grin that didn't quite conceal his fangs. She watched him back from beneath lowered lashes. His pale hands drew a rising arc in the darkness as he brought his lighter up to meet the cigarette held askew in one corner of his mouth. His left thumb flicked the striker of the gold Zippo and the flame leaped up, conjuring twin gold-on-gold reflections in his eyes. The light lent the momentary illusion of warmth to his angular features, threw the brow ridges of his demonic face into sharp relief and cast the hollows of his cheeks into deep shadow. He cupped his right hand around the cigarette, and the red ember at its tip flared, dimmed, and brightened again as he drew it to life.

She couldn't stand smokers, hated the smell of cigarettes, and was in full agreement with the old joke about the designated smoking areas in California being Arizona and Nevada. So why was the sight of Spike lighting up so god-damned sexy? Something about the way that sensual mouth pursed around the cigarette...or maybe the way those strong, long-fingered hands manipulated the lighter... He flicked the lighter off and returned it to his coat pocket. Smoke trickled from between his parted lips and coiled upwards in a lazy spiral. "Was it good for you, love?"

"Not as good as this." Buffy dragged him down without waiting for him to shake off the game face, grabbed his cigarette, and tossed it over her shoulder. She was afraid for a moment that he'd take her curiosity wrong, but after a moment's surprise Spike responded with all the enthusiasm she could have wished, and they were feeling each other up and trading long nicotine-flavored kisses again. The first time Angel had kissed her he'd vamped out uncontrollably, and ever after had been wary of it happening again. If anything, Spike seemed to have the opposite reaction; he had to concentrate to keep from reverting to human at her touch. Buffy ran her tongue over his teeth, testing the sharp points of his canines. Different. Dangerous. Thrilling.

She really had meant for tonight to be all business. Really. They had work to do. Vamps to kill, crazies to track. So naturally Spike had to show up looking hotter than a two-dollar pistol, and ride her around on what was essentially a two-wheeled, gas-powered vibrator until she was all hot and bothered. At least it wasn't just her. Spike had scarcely let her out of arm's reach all evening--always catching hold of her hand or touching her cheek or stroking her hair or brushing against her, as if to reassure himself that she was really there. Or maybe just to be touching her. For all her own longing, she'd never realized how starved for physical contact he was, too--going on two days' evidence, Spike was big on the PDAs.

So they were being businesslike. Really. Here on the town's main drag it was ever so much more inconspicuous for the two of them to go arm in arm than to stalk along like a pair of Old West gunslingers lookin' fer trouble at the OK Corral. Ending up macking in the alley next to the Sun was just an occupational hazard of going arm in arm, was all.

His soft cool lips tantalized her throat, his fangs making little teasing pinpricks against her skin that never came close to really drawing blood. Some part of her was completely astonished at all this implied about his control and her trust of it, but the rest of her shivered and melted as his hand slid up and over her shoulder, stroking the line of her collarbone where it ran beneath her jacket, then dropping to cup her breast. Her nipples went taut under his fingers. He had an unerring sense of what kind of touches, and where, turned her to goo. Best of all it was mutual; her hands were eliciting all kinds of happy little rumblings from Spike as they explored the lean hard lines of his torso. It was very easy to tell exactly what kinds of touches he liked, and where.

She made an attempt to break free of his circling arms that barely qualified as quarter-hearted. "We should patrol."

"We are patrolling."

"Patrolling implies actually moving from place to place at some point."

He nuzzled her collarbone. "I am moving from place... to... mmmmrrrhhrr...." Now this was a cool discovery; rub a vampire's brow ridges and he'd follow you anywhere. Fun with game face. Who knew? Spike tilted his head back with a goofily blissful expression, allowing her easier access to that completely lickable Adam's apple, and said hoarsely, "Got a dangerous vampire to keep an eye on right here, Slayer."

"Really?" She took advantage of the invitation and licked his throat, reveling in his pleasurable shudder. "I always thought this one was kind of a creampuff. I hear he uses excessive amounts of hair gel."

"How many times, pet?" His husky growl went right to the center of her being and pulsed there.

"What?"

"How many times did you bring yourself off today, thinkin' about last night?"

Thump him on the chest, hard. Had to be hard; soft wouldn't make an impression on that rock-solid body. "As if!" Could she make a quick grab for his shirt pocket and find out what the heck he was hiding in there? Or would any such attempt degenerate into further sessions of Grope The Vampire, and would either of them really object if it did?

Spike only laughed. "How many?"

She looked up, biting her lower lip with a reluctant smile. "Twice." At his skeptical look, "Well, twice before Tara got home." Her smile went wicked. "And you?"

He nipped at her pouting lip and chuckled. "If the whelp had shown up a few minutes earlier he'd've gotten an eyeful. I'll be in Guinness for non-stop wanking any day now if this keeps up. Not that I wasn't close already."

Buffy reached down and toyed with the buttons of his fly, cupping the already sizeable bulge in his jeans and letting her fingers stray to one side, then the other, teasing him through the worn black denim. "Seems to me like you're keeping up very nicely." He groaned and his cock jerked and hardened further beneath her touch. _So_ nice not to have to pretend Spike didn't exist below the belt buckle, especially when the real estate in that neighborhood was so choice. It was a little aggravating that he could scent her arousal no matter how she might try to hide it, but _everyone_ could see just how hot she got him, and it gave her a heady, joyful jolt of sexual power. _She_ did that to him, she, Buffy Summers, the one Angelus hadn't thought worth a second go, the one Riley had left for not needing him enough.

Spike growled deep in his chest and ground his body into hers. She was half a breath away from yanking the jeans right off those narrow, muscled hips (damned if she could tell what besides his hard-on kept them up in the first place) and going down on him right then and there when the scream tore through the noise of traffic and Saturday crowds.

"_Bugger_," Spike snarled with truly heartfelt viciousness.

Buffy bit back similar sentiments. Time to save the world, or at least the local part of it. "Sounds like it came from across the street. Come on."

They dashed out of the alley and down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians and prompting a few more shrieks from the people who noticed that Spike was still all fangy. Vaulting the hood of an acid-green Nissan parked at the intersection, Buffy paused on the corner, trying to concentrate on the tingle along her nerves that meant vampires were nearby. She'd never been as good at this aspect of the Slayer biz as the hitting parts, and having to filter out Spike's overwhelming presence didn't make it any easier. Still... "There," she said, pointing.

Spike's gaze followed her outstretched hand and he nodded, eyes lighting at the prospect of carnage. There were four this time. Smarter than the one who'd attacked earlier, too. Two of them, human features to the fore, were standing guard in the mouth of the alley behind the hairdresser's, camouflaged in seedy-young-adult uniforms of baggy jeans and oversized flannel shirts. Both stared insolently at the passers-by and silently dared anyone to venture past them. No one was taking them up on it. In the shadows of the alley behind them, two dimly visible figures loomed over a body sprawled out on the oil-stained concrete. Its leg kicked fitfully, once.

The guard-vamps sprouted fangs and dropped into a fighting stance the moment the two of them approached. Buffy shot a look at Spike--all it ever took. She dove at the vamp on the right while he tore into the one on the left with a joyful roar. Instead of closing with her foe she feinted, dropped, and rolled under his swing to come up behind him. She back-kicked as she came to her feet and slammed her heel into his kidneys as Spike grabbed his opponent by the scruff of the neck and rammed his head into the wall. The force of Buffy's kick sent her target staggering forward face-first into Spike's waiting fist, but she didn't bother to track his progress; without hesitation she leaped at the pair who were feeding on the man on the ground. She dug her fingers into the nearest one's shoulder and yanked him upright. "Hey, Mr. Selfish! Didn't your mom teach you that you shouldn't eat if you didn't bring enough for everyone in the class?"

The interrupted vampire snarled and lunged at her. She smashed a hard left into his jaw, sending him reeling back into the side of the nearby dumpster. Buffy grinned, flexing her hand. Oh, yeah, that felt good.

The second one's head snapped up, runnels of crimson trailing from the corners of her mouth. "Make-up's running, Elvira. Have a wet-nap." She snapped a front kick at the crouching vampire, catching her right under the chin. "Oopsie. That was my boot." Number One kicked off the dumpster and pounced her from behind. She elbowed him in the nose, whirled in place and drove her fist into his solar plexus. His legs went out from under him and she brought her knee up to catch him in the face again. The sound of bones breaking was music. _Yeah_. This was the stuff. Get out all that... frustration.

She caught a glimpse of Spike as she spun, engaged in his own dance with the other two. He was outright toying with them--he'd shifted back to human form, foregoing the extra advantage of strength and speed that letting his demon aspect surface gave him--saying, in essence, _I don't need it for ** you**_. He'd leave himself open, let them get in a hit or two, think they had him going, and then let go with a lightning-swift series of brutal kicks and blows. His face was alight with that huge tongue-wagging grin, loving the fight, turned on as all hell by the act of pummelling someone into the ground.

He caught her eye and winked, conspiratorial.

_You got off on it._

_And I suppose you're telling me you don't?_

The chill cramp of self-disgust in her stomach had a knock-down drag-out with the adrenaline rush of the fight, and lost--for the moment, anyway. The moment almost cost her; both of her foes took instant advantage of her distraction and for a second she staggered under the impact of their fists. She crashed into the side of the dumpster and the side panel fell open with a clang; one of the plastic bags inside burst and garbage cascaded out onto the ground. Buffy leaped to her feet, well and truly pissed off now. "Do you realize this blouse has to be dry-cleaned?" she snapped, whipping out her stake. "No more Ms. Nice Slayer!"

Over at the mouth of the alley Spike had taken note of her slip and already disposed of one of his foes; now he wrestled the second one into a headlock and wrenched, hard. The guard-vamp's scream was cut off as his head and body parted company.

Spike was coming for her, bursting right through the shower of grey-brown particles which were all that was left of his opponent. Buffy rammed her stake home, straight through the rib cage of the female vamp, and whirled, looking for the other one--no way was she going to let Spike dust more vamps in a night than she got. There he was, by the dumpster, just turning to face her. She readied the stake for a blow. Spike fell into position behind the remaining vamp, boxing him in. Buffy struck. The vampire howled in fear and dodged, but she'd taken that into account. Mr. Pointy arced towards his heart.

It wasn't there.

Giles had told her more than once during their training sessions that the opponent most to be feared was the inexperienced one, because they were the most unpredictable. Over the years Buffy had found the advice to be accurate, but pretty much useless--how could you predict something that wasn't predictable? Or in this case, even an opponent? The vamp gang's victim, still supine, had kicked the last vampire's legs out from under him. Her target was now flat on his butt on the ground, and her stake was now headed straight for Spike's chest.

Time slowed to a crawl. She saw Spike's eyes go wide, and his right forearm start up to block her at the approximate speed of molasses in January. She screamed at the pokiness of her nerve impulses, which were moseying from her brain to her arm at much the same pace.

She managed to divert her aim a fraction; he managed to block. The stake went flying. Shaking with equal parts relief and absolute fury, she bent and wrenched the nearest piece of sharp wood off the pallet leaning up against the wall behind the dumpster and stabbed it into the fallen vampire's chest. She stood there staring down at the place where it wasn't any longer, unable to control her shivering. _That could have been--could have been--_ "Spike! Are you OK?"

He patted himself down. "Yeh. Still undead, no thanks to..." A fearful whimper at their feet broke the spell. Spike's head turned slowly, his eyes sparking gold. The man who'd almost been lunch staggered to his feet, clutching the dumpster. Dark-haired, husky, wearing a Dodgers t-shirt... "You. I know you," Spike whispered. "Ramon, innit?" He smiled, the sweet, bone-chilling smile which presaged casual bloodshed, and without any further warning his hand shot out to clamp around Ramon's throat.

It had always been characteristic of Spike that he could go from edgy annoyance to full-blown murderous rage in the space of an eyeblink. It didn't happen often these days; two years of living with the chip had forced him to learn how to muzzle that demonic temper, but every now and then it chewed through the straps. _It's OK_, Buffy thought, _the chip will..._

She flashed on the night a month ago when she'd been dragged unwilling back to life, and the fight with Magnus Bryce's men: the crack of gunfire, the fiery lash of the bullet creasing her arm, Spike's fangs sinking into the neck of the man who'd shot her, heedless of the pain the chip was causing... and for the first time it really sank in that the chip made it very difficult for Spike to kill people--and very difficult was not the same as impossible.

Her fist met Spike's nose just before his fingers met flesh. He staggered with the double pain of her blow and the chip-shock, dropping the terrified Ramon immediately. Buffy heaved him up by the lapels with all her strength, tossing him across the alley and into the wall. He hit with an audible thump, slid down the wall and crumpled to the ground, clutching his head. Plainly dizzy and aching, he found his feet, then reeled back into the brick wall as Buffy's hard little fist smacked into his nose a second time.

"You ASSHOLE!" she yelled. Buffy interposed herself between Ramon and Spike, balanced on the balls of her feet, fist cocked and ready to hit the vampire again despite the tears welling in her eyes and the quiver of her mouth. "What are you THINKING?" For a long moment the two of them remained frozen, eyes locked, Spike's bloodied face a mask of impotent fury, all the more frightening for remaining human. "Spike..."

Her voice broke on his name, and perhaps he sensed the fear behind her anger. The rage in his eyes melted away as they softened from gold to blue, and he held out a placating hand. "Sorry, love--got a little carried away--"

"Carried away? Don't 'love' me, you--!" Her fist lashed out and Spike's expression hardened again--he grabbed her wrist before she could connect, making no move to fight her, but pulling her close and holding on, hard, before she tore her arm from his grasp. Buffy slapped both palms flat against his chest, ready to shove him off. She made the mistake of looking up and was instantly lost in the lustful, adoring azure of his eyes.

"Too late for that, pet."

Buffy's breath made a little hitching noise in her throat. "This isn't a game! You could have killed--" Ramon? Anyone? Should it have occurred to her that he could kill her too?

Spike shook his head with a rueful laugh and let her go, massaging his temples. "It didn't come off, did it?" He licked the trickle of blood from his upper lip. "And yours truly's got a bugger of a headache to keep me company for the next hour. No harm, no foul."

There was a voice in the back of her head yammering _No harm, no foul, no, it's wrong wrong wrong but I need him want him love--oh God, not that, not now, don't say it don't think it--still a monster, still a monster--_

Ramon, his dark eyes like saucers, broke and ran, kicking up a shower of garbage.

"Fuck!" Spike yelled as a crumpled milk carton smacked him in the head.

"Yeah!" Buffy gasped. "I mean, catch him!"

*****

The UC Sunnydale library had been built in the 70's, during a phase when architecture was all blocky textured cement pillars and plate glass. In the summer, in the daytime, the interior was pleasantly light and airy, but at night, in the winter, sitting too close to those vast blank windowed walls could give you the unnerving sensation of floating in some starless Lovecraftian void.

Which just went to show, Willow thought, giving the page in front of her a moody flip, that you could make anything creepy if you tried hard enough. She sighed and pulled her German dictionary over to look up another irregular verb. Obviously she wasn't trying hard enough, because the evening remained as prosaic as it could possibly be. Other students with book bags slung over their shoulders or varicolored stacks of texts in their arms drifted past her carrel in knots of twos or threes, exchanging low whispers on the location of the nearest card catalogue terminal, or the periodical literature room. Willow peered at them over the stacks of dictionaries and reference books piled around her. No one seemed nervous. There were no ominous flickering lights, no manifestations of power.

She hadn't been hoping for any, she told herself sternly. She was just doing research. Translating. Sure, the last time she'd opened this book she'd been caught up in a transcendent mystical experience unlike anything she'd ever known. But it had been wrong, and creepy, and evil, and anyway, things had been different then.

** _ Yes. Then you had power._ **

Her hand tightened on the pencil and the point snapped off, leaving a snail-trail squiggle of graphite across her translation notes. "Oh--" She looked guiltily around. It was practically sacrilegious to swear in a library, wasn't it? "Bugger," she finished in a much softer voice. There. British swearing didn't count. Giles had done it all the time. Willow Rosenberg, too much of a weenie to say fuck in a library. With a sigh she returned to her task. The scribbled footnote she was currently translating ran over onto the next page. She turned the yellow, dog-eared vellum over and began the laborious task of translating the next section.

In the next chapter," an oddly familiar voice said. Willow's head jerked up. Her reflection in the night-black glass gazed back, her but not her: a young woman in red lace and black leather posed seductively in her carrel, leaning on one hand and looking at her with a coquettish tilt of her head. Her hair, longer than Willow's, fell in russet sheaves about her pale, pixie-ish face. "Hi, Snuggles." She wiggled the fingers of her free hand at Willow. "What we want. In the next chapter." Her lips curved in a pouting smile and her voice grew husky. "Wanna look?"

Willow jumped to her feet, sending several of the books tumbling to the floor. She rubbed her eyes, hard, but her vampire avatar was gone, and the reflection in the window was her own prosaic self. "I'd say this verges on the disturbing," she muttered. Well, she'd wanted a transcendent mystic experience... She looked down at the shabby little book on the desktop, and after a few false starts, extended her hand and ran a finger over the pages. What was that disturbing rust-colored stain sticking those two leaves together? Best not think about it. One by one, she turned the pages until the next chapter heading leaped out at her from the top of one of them. The crabbed, archaic lettering blurred into illegibility in several places further down the page, but the title was clear: _Addressing That Which Abides In The Great Darkness_.

That didn't sound good. _Let's face it, nothing in this puppy is Norman Vincent Peale material. _ She sat down again, tracing the lines of text with one finger and frowning at the difficult language. The first few chapters of the grimoire had been devoted to necromantic spells of various kinds: spells to bind a ghost to your service, spells to reanimate the dead, spells to create zombies. The next few chapters had dealt with living souls, but had been no less uncomfy to contemplate--here there were spells for influencing decisions and clouding minds.

What she'd hoped to find was something that would restore a damaged spirit and allow her to regain her magic. This, however, was an invocation of some kind, though the author was cagey about what exactly was being summoned. Odd. Knowing the correct name of the being you were invoking was vital; otherwise you risked losing control.

_Who art beyond the light of sun or moon_ _Who precedeth time, who art the final darkness_ _My soul is yours; grant me therefore all that I desire,_ _Yea, though my desires be as the boundless sea shalt thou satisfy them_ _And in retu--_

The rest of the page was hopeless; at some point, someone had spilt ink over half of it. Willow turned to the next page; it wasn't in good condition, but she thought that it might still be decipherable if she worked at it. Still, this wasn't at all what she was looking for. Summoning some nameless, really-not-good-sounding critter was not on the agenda. Even if it could satisfy desires as boundless as the sea. Which did kind of cover getting one's mojo back, didn't--

Willow slammed the book shut, stood up, and began stuffing things into her backpack. It was past time to get home.

*****

Not catching someone was a good deal more difficult than it looked.

Up ahead of them Ramon staggered to a halt and doubled over in the crimson glow of a NO VACANCY sign, hands braced against his knees. Lincoln had once been the main route into Sunnydale, back before the interstate came through, and was lined with a string of grungy little motels built back in the 40's--horseshoes of little detached cabins rejoicing in decaying pioneer ambience. Spike could remember staying in ones just like them on cross-country trips with Dru, in the days when they'd been new and fashionably kitschy. He made a mental note to mention the fun factor of faux log cabin sex to Buffy, and to leave out the part about having the inhabitants of the cabin next door for breakfast.

Lurking in the shadows of the Ace Hardware store across the street, Spike watched as Ramon looked up, scanning the apparently deserted street. The vampire could see the droplets of sweat beading on his brow, each one reflecting the gory neon light. The breeze brought the ambrosial scent of blood and fear to his nose. Ramon'd tried to be tricky at first, but his pursuers knew downtown Sunnydale intimately, and they were both faster and had more endurance than he did. After ten minutes of dodging through alleys and doubling back, their quarry had taken a straight course down Lincoln towards the edge of town. And he was their quarry, no doubt about that. They'd loped along behind him for a good three miles now, like wolves wearing down a deer on the Discovery Channel. It had been a long time since he'd hunted a human being in earnest, but the old skills returned with gratifying speed.

In the time it took the man to wipe the sweat from his brow Spike left the doorway, flowing down the darkened sidewalk with unearthly swiftness to crouch behind the wire lattice shading a bus bench twenty feet closer to his mark. Across the street he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye: Buffy, leaving her own hiding place for new concealment. A breath later she was by his side, her gaze never leaving the back of Ramon's head.

She carried herself with tense grace of a lioness stalking a gazelle. There was a wildness of spirit in her that called out to him in kinship, and reveled as he did in the hunt and the kill, that leapt up in joy within her when danger made the blood run quick and hot in her veins. _Artemis of Sunnydale, Night's huntress/Shall I behold thy unclothed glory/and the hounds of my heart tear my flesh...? Oh, that's brilliant, that is. No improvement in compositional skills in a hundred and twenty years, I see._ No, no cold, chaste huntress this beside him. She brooked no comparison to old goddesses, this woman who could out-fight and out-fuck the lot of them. Whatever siren song the night held for her, Buffy had always denied it sway over her life, living with a fierce resolve that the Slayer in her would be servant, not master. He wasn't sure if he loved her more because of or despite that resolve and the distance it put between them.

He'd never been able to take Dru on a hunt like this; she was too easily distracted--ironic that he was finally getting to share this particular thrill with someone only after he could no longer bring it to its deadly conclusion. Buffy laid a hand on his thigh, splayed fingers warm through the black denim, and suddenly the lack of a deadly conclusion didn't seem such a hardship. Perhaps he'd take to carrying a camera like those ponces who couldn't bear to shoot the cute furry animals.

She glanced at him and made a small motion towards Ramon, a question in her eyes. Spike shook his head. Normally he was willing to follow her lead on patrol, but this was his element. Buffy fought demons; she had little experience with hunting humans. Ramon straightened and jogged off again. Spike laid a restraining hand on Buffy's shoulder, allowing their prey to move on unmolested for a moment before continuing the pursuit. "He's headed for the dump," he whispered.

Fifteen minutes later, they were half-crouched at the summit of a mountain of junk, peering over the crest and down into the valley below. Buffy brushed at the unidentifiable smear of black gunk on her sleeve with distaste. "Why can't more villains lair in luxury condos?"

'Villains' was stretching it. In an arroyo formed by two intersecting ranges of trash, half a dozen crazies were visible in the rubble. One of them going from one ramshackle shelter to the next delivering food--plastic-wrapped microwave burritos, it looked like. The others, under Tanner's supervision, busied themselves with the Sisyphean task of keeping the shelters from falling to pieces around them, adjusting the positions of old doors and pieces of plywood and sheet metal according to some arcane architectural plan. "Bloody Hooverville down there," Spike muttered. The aggravating thing was that this miniature Calcutta had been growing practically under his nose all summer--he came to the dump at least once a week to scout for useful discards. Not that he would have considered it anything more than a possible source of amusement if he had discovered it, but he'd probably have mentioned it to one of the humans, and they'd doubtless have felt the need to investigate, and the whole mess could have been nipped in the bud far earlier.

Still, it wasn't as if they'd hung out a welcome sign. They'd done a bang-up job of hiding their little community among the winding canyons of trash. Nothing was visible from the area of the dump near the front gate, and since he'd often had Dawn with him on his own expeditions here over the summer, he'd avoided foraging too far afield. "Now what?"

Buffy elbowed herself up over a broken-legged record cabinet and frowned down at the collection of huts. "_Survivor: The Hellmouth!_ gets yanked for low ratings," she said. "Number one, we take Tanner out. Number two, we get the rest of his little Kool-Aid cult. Number three... I haven't gotten to number three yet." She dropped back down behind the crest of the trash heap and kicked a tangle of old Christmas tree lights out of her way.

"Can't say that 'Get em's' not a plan after my own heart, love, but exactly what are we going to do with them once they're got?"

She looked disgruntled. "If Tara's right and Will can't fix them up, I don't know what we can do. But they shouldn't be living here like this, no matter what. Maybe I can talk to Dawn's social worker about it. She's got to be good for something besides dropping by to snoop for dirty dishes." She glanced over her shoulder. "This bites. I don't do strategy. Giles does strategy. I hit things."

Spike sucked his cheeks in. "The Watcher isn't going to be around to do strategy much longer, pet."

That made her flinch. Without a word, Buffy got to her feet and began picking her way through the rubbish, back towards the front gate. Spike followed her in a small landslide of trash. He studied the set of her shoulders as they walked; her arms were folded across her chest and she kept her head down. The retreat into blank non-emotion was painful in contrast to the animation she'd shown five minutes ago.

As they reached the gate to the dump Spike hesitated, then took a couple of longer strides to catch up with her, and fell into step at her side. He couldn't help feeling that he was taking an enormous chance, somehow, despite all they'd shared in the last twenty-four hours, but buggered if he was going to let her crawl into her shell again and pull the shell in after her. He put an arm round her shoulders. Buffy looked up at him, startled, and for an instant she stiffened, about to pull away. But she didn't, and bit by bit the tenseness drained out of her. At last she leaned into his side, butting her head into his shoulder with a muffled sigh. "It's so much easier when you can solve problems by killing something," she said wistfully.

Spike's mouth twitched in a wry smile. "Tell me about it."

It was well past midnight when they rolled into the Summers' driveway. Buffy pulled off her helmet and shook her hair out. "Gah. You are never, but never, going to con me into driving that monster again. It's like a recurring Driver's Ed nightmare."

Spike leaned back in the seat and grinned at her. "Come on, if the Bit can drive it, surely it's not too much for the mighty Slayer! But if it makes you wobbly in the knees, next time you can take the bike." Buffy's speculative look made him regret the offer instantly. Her only advantage over Dawn as a chauffeur was possession of a valid driver's licence--he might drive like a maniac, but Buffy Summers drove like an inexperienced maniac. Following along behind her on the motorcycle for the brief drive from the Magic Box back to the cemetery would have been heart-stopping had his heart been beating in the first place, and went a long way towards explaining why she cadged so many rides with him when she had her mother's perfectly good SUV sitting in the garage. He gave the motorcycle a protective pat and silently promised it never to let her near the ignition. "Well. Suppose I'd better be getting on home."

Buffy stood in the driveway, turning the helmet round and round in her hands. "Do you--I mean, it's not that late--would you like to come in for a bit?"

Spike allowed himself a smirk at her incongruous attack of propriety. "This the bit where I'm supposed to shuffle my feet and look shy? Right--" He adopted a dreadful American accent. "Gosh, Buffy, that'd be swell!"

"Oh, get off the bike and come on!" Buffy snapped, but her eyes were sparkling. "I'm only inviting you in so I can palm Dawn's gross casserole off on you."

"The Bit's a culinary genius, and someday you Philistines will appreciate her." Spike let down the kickstand, and swung off the bike to follow her inside. The house was dark, not that that made any difference to him, and there was no sign of light from upstairs. Willow or Tara sometimes made a late night of spellcasting on weekends, but not tonight, apparently.

Buffy maneuvered around the furniture in the darkened living room and turned on the light in the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and began rummaging around. "Speaking of munchies, you want anything? Tara left some hamburgers--"

"Thought you'd never ask, I'm half famished." Spike reached over her shoulder and snagged the carton of pig's blood, twisted the cap off and took a long swig.

Buffy made an irritated noise and pointed across the kitchen to the cupboard where the glasses were. "Spike, were you raised in a barn? Don't drink out of the carton!" She looked nonplused for a moment. "Did I just say that? Kafka moment. I'm turning into a giant Mom. You've got my permission to kill me now."

"There are worse fates, love," Spike said with a chuckle. He went over to the cupboard, took his usual glass from the shelf and poured himself a generous helping of the pig's blood. He stuck the glass in the microwave and took the carton back to the fridge; Buffy was examining one of the wrapped up hamburgers with a faintly queasy expression.

"I think this one's yours--that, or Tara's getting really forgetful." She handed it to him; to Spike's delight it was practically raw and oozing blood all over the bun.

"Now that was right thoughtful of her." Spike took a large bite and raised his eyebrows at Buffy's gagging noises. "Wha?" He retrieved his glass of blood and took it and the burger into the living room, set them down on the coffee table and sprawled out on the couch with a sigh of content. Buffy followed him in a moment later with her rather more well-done meal and a mug of decaf tea--mint, by the smell of it--shoved him over and curled up beside him.

They were both too occupied with wolfing down their post-midnight snack to say anything for awhile, and Spike felt no need to break the companionable silence afterwards. Buffy didn't seem to be in a particularly amorous mood; she had the faint line between her brows which denoted deep thought, and was content to burrow into his side and draw comfort from his nearness. Spike sipped his slowly cooling blood, listened to her heart beat, and tried to figure out why he felt so odd. _Bloody hell. I'm happy._

"I lied to Will and Tara the other morning," Buffy said.

Spike cocked his head inquiringly and said nothing. She continued, "I told them I'd had a revelation--about how no one's happy all the time, so it was normal that I wasn't, yippee skippee I'm getting better." She contemplated her tea. "I did have a revelation that morning, but that wasn't it."

Spike made a non-committal go-ahead noise. The tension had returned to her limbs, as if what she was telling him was difficult for her to get out. "It was about you pulling me out of the way of that truck. I almost died. Again. And I realized--you're not going to be there every time a truck comes along. Sooner or later, I will die again. It was such a peaceful feeling. I don't even have to do anything suicidal--I'm the Slayer. You said it yourself--Death's always on my tail."

His fingers tightened on her shoulder. "Buffy... you know that promise I made you, when you first came back?"

Buffy looked up at him with solemn eyes; in this light they were stormy grey. "You're not backing out on it, are you? Willow claims the only reason you're sorry I came back is because I'm unhappy about it."

Spike shook his head and set his blood down on the coffee table, disturbing her briefly with the movement. "Well... yeh, she's right there." He leaned back once more and tucked her under his arm, his free hand straying to her face and stroking her cheek. "No fear. When you die next, I'll make sure you stay dead. But fair warning, Slayer--I'm on your tail too, and if the bloke with the scythe thinks he'll get to you again without a fight from yours truly, he's in for a shock." He dropped his head to rest his forehead on hers, cringing a little at the broken note he couldn't quite keep out of his voice. "I'm sorry, love, that's the best I can do. I'm a selfish bastard, and it's all I'm ever going to have, this right here. I want it to last. I don't know where we vamps go when we get dusted, but it's bloody well certain to have a warmer climate than wherever you end up."

A haunted look crossed Buffy's face for an instant. She reached up, her fingertips tracing a feather-light path down the arch of his cheek in unconscious mirroring of his gesture. As if, mirabile dictu, the thought of his not being there troubled her, and she sought reassurance of his presence. "I can live with that. So to speak." She laughed a little. "I'm beginning to think... maybe I wasn't lying to them after all." The line between her brows reappeared, and she tilted her chin up, regarding him with upside-down gravity. "You wanted to kill Ramon tonight."

He raised his head and looked down at her for a long, level moment. She kept her eyes fixed on his, but he could feel a tremor running through her. He longed to say something that would soothe it away, return the laughter to her eyes. To lie to her. The one thing he'd never been able to pull off, even if he hadn't promised... _You want it real, Buffy Anne Summers..._ He braced himself. "Vampire, love. I always _want_ to kill them." She lay against him, quiescent, listening, neither drawing closer nor pulling away. He felt the restless urge to get up and start pacing, but as long as she was willing to sit here he wasn't minded to encourage her to leave. _So why are you still talking, you git?_ "Most of them, anyway. Don't want to kill you. Or the Bit. Or the rest of your little gang of followers--well, Harris, sometimes, but he'd stain the rug. We do that, you know. Not kill the people we... get on with."

"So basically we've got half a dozen people you wouldn't kill if the chip came out tomorrow, and then there's the rest of the world?" Her voice was remarkably steady; no one less attuned to her minute shifts of mood would have caught the quaver beneath the confidence. "You see, I need to know where I stand, Spike."

Spike rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Not exactly. Look, there's always been categories, like. People who shoot you, or tie me up and sodding near turn my brain to tapioca--I'll always want to kill them. Most people, I don't give a damn about them one way or the other. Unless I'm bored or peckish or pissed off, and then I want to kill them. There's necessary people, like Bernie Kohlermann or Willy, and I won't kill them, even if I want to--" _And let's not examine the laundry list of humanity piling up in this category too closely, William, because I don't fancy explaining exactly how Dawn's silly little bints of friends are vital to your continued existence, do you? It's like bloody stray cats, once you give 'em names-_ \- "And then there's people I... love, and I don't want to kill them unless they're being particular bitches--oi, mind the leather! But it's not the wanting or not wanting that matters in the end, is it? It's whether or not they end up on the dinner menu." He hesitated. "And--"

Both of them looked up at the noise on the stairs. Tara stood there, clutching her robe to her. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I fell asleep. I wouldn't have interrupted, but I heard voices, and--it's Dawn. I got the call right after you checked in at ten, and then I tried calling back, but you'd left and no place else I called had seen you. She--she got arrested."


	14. Chapter 14

She'd been caught. She couldn't believe she'd been caught. That wasn't supposed to happen. She wasn't supposed to be in Sunnydale's Second Precinct, locked up in a bare holding cell that smelled like six years worth of stale barf. Dawn huddled on the grimy bench that ran along the back wall, staring down at the loops and splatters of stains decorating the worn linoleum between the toes of her sneakers, and tried very hard not to throw up.

"Pretty," the old woman crooned, shuffling a little closer and reaching out towards Dawn's hair. "Such a pretty green."

Dawn flinched away, and the woman's brown-paper-bag face crumpled into lines of hurt and disappointment. She drew her three layers of tatty sweaters more closely around her and shuffled away again, muttering under her breath. Dawn drew a silent breath of relief and relaxed her guard slightly. She hated the fact that even though her career as a mystical McGuffin was supposed to be over, she still roused unpredictable reactions in people who weren't quite in touch with reality. They feared her or adored her, and there didn't seem to be anything she could do about it but try to avoid them. The two of them had been playing musical chairs around the cell for the last hour, except without music and without chairs. The old woman was probably a harmless kook, in for panhandling or loitering or something, she told herself. Not every street person in Sunnydale is a member of Mystery Man Tanner's gang of Nutcase Commandos, out to suck your brains.

"Looks like you've made a new best friend," the girl on the other end of the bench observed. She was maybe a year or two older than Dawn, with thin, fox-sharp features, and a vaguely Goth-y air--dead black hair, raccoon-mask of mascara, and artfully ragged layers of black skirts over black tights bagging a little at the knees. She'd asked Dawn if she had any cigarettes when she came in, and had ignored her since.

Dawn shrugged, keeping her eyes on her toes.

"This your first time?"

Dawn shrugged again. _Shut up. Don't talk to me. I'm not really here_. The other girl smiled, a knowing grin that didn't reach her ice-colored eyes. "Yeah, first time. I can tell. You're all twitchy and stiff, like you're too good to be here."

_Shut up, shut up, shut up..._ Dawn chanted to herself. Couldn't the floor swallow her? Where was the Hellmouth when you really needed it? The embarrassment was almost worse than the fear. She'd been in worse places, in far more danger. But this was different. This was no surreal nightmare with demons and magic which would fade in the light of day. This was stupid, boring, real-world trouble which would only get worse when the sun came up.

"You'll get used to it," the Goth chick concluded.

Dawn felt her face growing hot. _No, I won't! _ She let the wave of self-pity wash over her and tried to distract herself with the daydream she'd been constructing ever more elaborate versions of since she'd gotten here. By now it was practically a five-act epic complete with orchestra and hors d'oeuvres during intermission.

It was about Christmas, which imposed a high lameness factor. But Halloween had been a nightmare, what with Buffy's Raising and their dad freaking and everything, and Thanksgiving had been a Family Value Bucket from KFC, so she figured she was due one good holiday this year. She knew just how it would go, and if she scrunched her eyes really tight she could see it all play out.

_On Christmas Eve, Willow would be all recovered and she and Tara would be laughing together again. Spike would show up early, dashing from car to porch and trailing smoke in the last rays of the setting sun. Buffy would make some sarcastic remark about the brain-deadness of certain vampires, but she'd be smiling. The witches would curl up in the big overstuffed chair, and Spike and her sister would sit on the couch with her, and they'd have popcorn and Christmas cookies and cocoa._

Down the hall where the men's cells were someone was yelling, a hash of words that didn't make any sense. Dawn clapped her hands over her ears, but it didn't help much. The black-haired girl laughed. Dawn tried to melt into the bench while touching as little of its surface as possible. She added phantom jimmies to the illusory cookies.

"You know, you'll be more comfortable if you take that pole out of your ass," the black-haired girl said.

"Shut up," Dawn muttered. _They'd have sandwiches and turn on the TV and watch Ralphie scheme to get the Red Rider air rifle, and toss back eggnog with a splash of rum (or in Spike's case, rum with a splash of eggnog) every time someone said "You'll shoot your eye out!" and everyone would get a little bit silly. Then they'd watch Jimmy Stewart race down Main Street in the snow while Spike complained that the SNL sketch where the townsfolk banded together to beat Mr. Potter to death was a much better ending. When the movies were over she'd go to the record cabinet that still held Mom's collection of LPs, and pull out the scratchy old Bing Crosby album and put it on. And she'd pretend she was too old and sophisticated for carols, and Tara would tease her and she'd let herself be convinced and they'd sing along to "White Christmas."_

The old woman shuffled over again and picked up a lock of Dawn's hair, running it through her fingers. "Pretty shiny light..."

Hating the tears of stress that pricked her eyes, Dawn jerked her head away, jumped to her feet and hissed, "Go away!"

The woman stared at her for a long moment and then tears began spilling from her eyes, winter rains flooding the eroded planes of her face. Deep wracking sobs shook her, the sort of unguarded weeping no one over the age of five should be doing in public. Dawn stood in the middle of the cell, thin fingers clasping her arms in an agony of embarrassment. Great. Now on top of everything else, she felt like shit for making a crazy old woman cry.

_And everyone would go to bed, and Buffy would get Spike a blanket and a pillow for the couch, but if Dawn stayed awake long enough there'd be footsteps on the stairs. She'd shout them out of bed at six-thirty in the morning, snicker at Buffy's feeble attempts at explaining why Spike was there, and have sisterly blackmail material for the next week. And Tara would put the turkey in the oven, and her sister would put on airs because she remembered what a potato ricer was, and Spike would hang around being male and nuiscancy and try to steal the marshmallows which were supposed to go on the mashed yams._

She craned her neck, staring down the institutional green tunnel of the long hall to catch a glimpse of the clock on the wall down at the end, but the angle was so sharp she couldn't tell where the hands were. How long had she been here? It had to be past midnight. The security guys had pounced on them at nine, just before the mall closed. An hour's worth of humiliating interrogation by store security, and then the cops had showed up. Lisa's parents had come and picked her up hours ago, and dragged her home in a protective fury, declaring that she was not going to be allowed to associate with a bad influence like Dawn Summers any longer.

Buffy was coming. Buffy always came, even when she was sick and tired of dragging her stupid little sister to safety for the seven zillionth time. Didn't she? Dawn swallowed a pathetic little sob. God, what if Buffy'd decided it would teach her a lesson to be left here all night? What if a Zarkroth demon had eaten Tara before Buffy got home and her sister never got the message? What if Spike was nailing Buffy to the mattress in his crypt and--SO not thinking about that one.

_Anya and Xander would come over, and Giles, who'd decided not to go back to England after all, and they'd all watch "It's a Charlie Brown Christmas" and Xander would do the Snoopy dance. And then dinner would be ready, and afterwards they'd open presents and everyone would get exactly what they wanted. She'd look at the pictures of her and Buffy and Mom scattered around the living room, and feel kind of achy because Mom wasn't there, but it would be a good ache. And it wouldn't matter that her sister was the Slayer and Spike was a vampire and most of all it wouldn't matter that she had done something as incredibly stupid as get caught stealing an egg-strangler from Williams &amp; Sonoma, because it was Christmas and they were a family now and weird love was way, WAY better than no love._

Voices echoed down the hall from the admitting desk, distorted by distance and the muffling effects of acoustic tile. A second later the screech of unoiled casters pushing away from the desk was followed by the overlapping clack-clack of several pairs of approaching footsteps. Dawn shot to her feet. "Please be Buffy, please be Buffy..."

It was the policewoman from the desk at the end of the hall, and with her was Buffy with her eyes crackling green and her mouth in that thin hard line that meant someone was going to get it but good. Spike loomed behind her, hands thrust into the pockets of his duster, sucking on an unlit cigarette with a scowl. The homeless woman shrank back into the corner of the cell at the sight of him; the people who lived on Sunnydale's underbelly were more willing to admit to the things that walked among them than the town's daylight inhabitants. The Goth chick was either bolder or less experienced than she'd have had Dawn believe; she got up and sauntered over to the bars, eyeing the newcomers speculatively. "Hey. Got a cig?"

Buffy ignored her, and stood with arms folded impatiently as the policewoman searched through her jingling mass of keys. Spike favored Dawn's cellmate with an unfriendly leer. "Might. What's it worth to you?" He grinned a little as Buffy gave them both the Laser Death Glare, and winked at Dawn. She felt a rush of relief; surely Spike's presence would shield her from some of Buffy's wrath--if nothing else, diverting Buffy from being mad at her into being mad at Spike was usually a piece of cake.

The policewoman at last found the key she was looking for. She shooed the older women away from the door, and Dawn rushed over as soon as they vacated. She grabbed the cold steel bars, barely restraining herself from bouncing up and down. At last the door swung open, and Dawn flung herself out into the hallway and broke down in relief. "Oh, God, Buffy, I thought you were never coming, I was so scared--"

Her sister's angry facade slipped for just an instant. Dawn was caught up in a fervent, awkward three-way hug, her face wedged between Buffy's head and Spike's shoulder with the familiar comforting scents of L'Oreal hair conditioner and smoke-impregnated leather filling her nose. She had never felt safer.

Buffy pulled away first. "Let's get out of here. Dawn, you've got a lot of explaining to do."

Gah. That was the tight, calm Buffy-voice. She'd been hoping for the outraged yelling Buffy-voice. Worse, her sister was breaking out the Mom phrases. Dawn nodded meekly as the warder closed the cell door behind her. Its ominous clang followed them down the hall as they left the cellblock and made their way through the precinct room. Buffy was pissed. Really pissed. She glanced up at Spike, who shrugged elaborately and made a 'better you than me' face. She shivered. Much less safe-feeling, now.

The ride home wasn't any better. Buffy drove with both hands locked to the SUV's steering wheel, looking neither right nor left and daring any lesser traffic to challenge her. Luckily the bar rush hadn't started yet and the streets were relatively empty. Spike slouched in the passenger seat, playing with his lighter and occasionally looking sideways at Buffy. The wind, which had been just a playful breeze earlier in the evening, had picked up, and was slapping the car with fitful little sprays of raindrops, just enough to get the windshield dirty.

Dawn had intended to stay cool and calm, but the oppressive silence expanded by the minute, filling the car's interior and finally squeezing words out of her. "It's not like I took anything important!"

"That's not the point," Buffy snapped.

"Point is, you got caught," Spike said, in tones of deep disappointment.

"That's not the point either!" Buffy took out her fury on an innocent paper cup blowing across the lane, swerving to crush it. Dawn and Spike unobtrusively grabbed their respective door handles. "The point is, stealing is wrong!"

Dawn glared sullenly at the back of her sister's head. Now that she was no longer in immediate danger of becoming someone's prison bitch, Buffy's attitude was beginning to grate. "Oh, right. I remember all those calls Mom and Dad got from Bullock's when we lived in L.A., Miss Oh-I-Meant-To-Pay-For-That."

"Slayer!" Spike exclaimed in delight. "And here I thought nicking that rocket launcher was your first time! I knew you were a girl after my own heart!"

Buffy's eyes narrowed dangerously, and Dawn saw her opportunity and seized it. _Sorry, Spike, you're going down. _ "Besides, Spike steals all the time and you never rag on him! Half the stuff he owns is stolen!"

"Yeh, but I don't get caught," Spike countered. "There's a big difference here."

One didn't need vampire hearing to pick up the sound of Buffy's teeth grinding. "We're not talking about me, and we're not talking about Spike, and hello, the using of someone who spent the last century eating people as your model for good behavior? _Not_ ideal! And I didn't steal the rocket launcher, Xander did!" She returned her attention to the road in time to avoid a close encounter with the palm trees along the median. "Are we agreed that stealing is wrong?" She shot a look at Spike, who jerked to attention in his seat.

"Wrong," he agreed, sounding more nostalgic than disapproving. "Vile, wicked, evil..."

Dawn transferred the sullen glare to Spike. "All right, I get it."

Her sister's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. "You'd better get it--both of you. This isn't a joke. While you're out auditioning for Second Punk on the Left, have you thought about the fact that the moment this gets back to Social Services you will be shipped off to Dad Fed-Ex? Is that what you want?"

Spike looked somewhat chastened and Dawn bit her lip. "No."

"Good. I - " Buffy's shoulders slumped. "I can't do this right now. I'm tired, Dawn. We'll talk about it tomorrow."

*****

The crypt door was, as usual, unlocked. When Buffy slammed it open into the stone wall the clang reverberated through the crypt, and the echoes hadn't entirely died away by the time she'd clambered down the stairs to the lower chamber, and stormed into the bedchamber to glare at the still-slumbering occupant. Spike was the picture of repose in a nest of feather pillows and hunter-green quilting, one arm folded over the coverlet and the other curled under his cheek. His chest rose and fell just often enough to startle you into realizing it was still most of the time. Exactly when had Spike gone all hedonistic? When she'd come barging into the crypt last year at this time, she'd usually found him stretched out corpse-fashion on the top of the bare stone sarcophagus upstairs, hands crossed over his chest--playing vampire, she'd thought to herself scornfully at the time, talking the talk while the chip prevented him from walking the walk.

Unnatural creature that he was, he looked far more at home in the bed. _ Well, we'll just have to do something about that._ Buffy bent down, grabbed a handful of blankets and yanked them ruthlessly into the air.

Spike's eyes flew open. Half-way into game face, he spun over with a yip of surprise and a futile grab at the bedclothes. "Grraahr--oh, it's you."

"How long has this been going on?" Buffy demanded.

The vampire's eyebrows took a tour upwards. He ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair, then leaned back into the pillows and laced his fingers across his stomach, displaying a great deal of muscular and distracting ivory flesh. "How long's what been going on? Me getting some well-deserved shut-eye, or you rudely interrupting it? Not long enough and too long, respectively." Without warning he jackknifed forward, grabbed the trailing edge of the blankets and hauled back.

Buffy teetered, lost her balance and toppled onto the bed in a tangle of coverlet and Spike's overly cold and boney shins. She scrambled to her hands and knees, determined to hold onto her outrage despite the awkwardness of her position. Spike was leering at her, and she realized that from this angle he could see all the way down her shirt. Not that there was anything down there he hadn't already seen, but it was the principle of the thing. Flushing, she sat upright and tugged her blouse into place. "You know what I'm talking about--Dawn stealing! And you teaching her how!"

Spike went wary. He rubbed the back of his head. "Haven't the foggiest, love. She was doing the Artful Dodger routine well before yours truly entered the picture. We got chummy over her nicking Giles's journal, remember?" He rearranged his feet under the covers to take advantage of the warm spot where she was sitting.

Buffy folded her arms and resolutely avoided looking down to where the toes of his right foot were stroking her thigh. With some effort she kept her voice as cold as said toes. "She said you showed her how to shoplift over the summer."

"I never!"

Buffy kept looking at him; Spike was pathetically easy to crack if you did the little skeptical eyebrow thing. A trace of guilt crept into his eyes. "All right, I might have given her a pointer or two. More a demonstration, like, of how I do it. But I _never_ gave her the nudge to use 'em. I knew you wouldn't want that, and you know I'd never do anything to hurt Dawn, Buffy!" He leaned forward and caught her hands in his own, looking so genuinely distressed that had the matter been any less important she would have been tempted to forgive him immediately.

But this was serious. Buffy remained adamant. "But you knew she was stealing things, and you didn't stop her."

Spike sighed. "I guessed. Didn't exactly know for certain. She gave me a little something once or twice, aftershave for my birthday, that sort of thing. I never asked where it came from--wouldn't've been polite--and she never told. Didn't seem to matter then. You were gone, and Dawn was going to your Dad..."

"It matters a whole heaping lot now!"

He leaned over the side of the bed and rummaged around until he came up with his jeans, got up and began pulling them on. "Look, I'll talk to her if you think it'll help--give her any load of righteous bollocks you like."

Buffy flopped backwards onto the bed and stared up at the cobwebby ceiling. _Spike has a birthday?_ "Because the gospel of virtue is ever so convincing coming from you?"

His dark brows angled downwards, accents on a frown. "I mean it, Buffy. I..." He stalked over to the dresser, pulled a drawer out and studied the half-dozen identical black t-shirts intently for a moment before pacing away again. "...am getting shagged out on basic black. Look, it's hard, this not being evil," he said, low-voiced. "Like I said. But I've got to try, don't I? Especially if I've buggered things up for the Bit. At least let me try."

There was a pleading note in his voice, and Buffy felt her resolve crumbling. "I guess it couldn't hurt." She rolled over onto her stomach and traced the thin gold curlicues on the coverlet with one dispirited finger. "I called the store this morning and they're willing to drop the charges since it's her first time, but she's banned from the mall for six months. She's already going through withdrawal." She buried her face in the sheets; they smelled of smoke and Spike, and she didn't want the combination to be so comforting when she was mad at him. r0;This morning she hit me with that camper we stole last spring. I've got to be a better example. You've got to - "

"Establish a legal identity, get a nine to five job, and become a fine upstanding undead American? Not happening, pet."

She turned her head enough to give him the evil eye from behind a fold of blanket. "I was going to say, stop stealing things in front of Dawn, but watching a vampire with a fake green card dodging La Migra would make up for a lot of sucky days."

"Ah?" Spike pulled open the wardrobe door and rooted through the tangle of coat hangers, finally emerging with a charcoal grey turtleneck which, Buffy couldn't help thinking, would look absolutely gorgeous with his eyes and go very nicely with her own taupe-and-silver outfit. Color coordination, always a plus. "And what happens the next time you lot need me for a spot of breaking and entering or grand theft auto? You're not the most law-abiding little group yourselves, you know--I'm just better at it."

Buffy lifted her head and groaned. "I know, I know! God, Spike, I can't do this! When I was fifteen I was doing the exact same thing, except for me it was all about Mom and Dad's divorce. How can I lecture her on Thou Shalt Not Steal when my whole life is Thou Shalt Not Steal Unless It's Necessary For The Slaying or You're The Slayer's Vampire Boyfriend In Which Case We'll Overlook It?"

Spike stopped in the middle of pulling the sweater over his head, looking down at her with an incongruously sweet, tender little smile.

_What?_ She ran the last few sentences backwards. _I used the B word. Tactical error. Maybe he won't notice. Right. This is Spike, owner and proprietor buffyobsession.com. I'm so doomed_.

Spike tossed his shirt on the bed and sat down beside her. She felt a firm hand on her back, cool fingers working along the tense lines of her muscles. "You do what every mum and dad in the history of the universe has done, love. You lie so hard that you forget you ever had a misspent youth, and if that doesn't work, you pull out the classic 'Do as I say, not as I do' line of shite. I'll help, if I can--if you want me to."

She summoned up a wan smile and laid her cheek on his thigh. Astonishing how quickly that cool body soaked up heat. "I don't want to be the grown-up," she said, hating the sulky note in her own voice. Her hand crept up to rest on his knee, and she scrunched a little closer. There was some magnetism between them, that flesh called to flesh the instant an invisible line was crossed. "But I guess I've got to break out the sensible shoes and PTA notes. I may be off the hook with Social Services if they're not pressing charges, but if the police called them already--"

"Best defense is a good offense, right?" Spike had that glint in his eyes that meant trouble. "Don't wait for someone to tell tales, go runnin' to 'em right off and bleat for counseling and pamphlets and sodding educational filmstrips. Dawn'll bloody well hate you, but you'll look all responsible-like."

Buffy raised her head and looked at him oddly. "That's... a halfway decent plan. Who are you, and what have you done with Spike?"

He chuckled. "I know a thing or two about strategy, Slayer. It's sticking to it where I cock up. Give me a day or two and I'll chuck the whole thing for whaling on the bastards with a tire iron." He glanced at the clock on the nightstand next to the bed, and his hand wandered down to caress the curve of her hip as his voice dropped to a sultry growl. "'Sides, I think I can make bein' grown up worth your while."

She shivered under his touch and looked longingly at the clock. She had an hour before she had to get to Giles's place... She slid her hand further up his thigh and felt him shiver in return. "Well... As long as we're on overlapping schedules, I guess we might as well..." Spike twitched violently. _Ooh, he's ticklish_. She smiled, feeling very wicked and decadent and... grown up. "Overlap."

*****

Crisp black letters on heavy, cream-colored paper blazoned with the Council of Watchers' arms on one corner, signed by Quentin Travers in ink which had undoubtedly come from a fountain pen or perhaps even a quill--a weighty letter, full of weighty news. Giles wondered if he was supposed to be grateful that they'd rated the bother of a real letter, not some smudged fax or ephemeral scatter of phosphors on a monitor. "It's not good news, I'm afraid."

Buffy, sitting at attention on the couch, tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair back into her ponytail--she had arrived somewhat disheveled, for reasons Giles felt it better not to inquire into very closely, and was still effecting repairs. She studied the results in her compact, granted them provisional approval, and tucked it back into her purse. "My brilliant powers of deduction told me as much when you said you wanted to talk to me in person." She clasped her hands in her lap, poised against the backdrop of half-packed boxes and half-sorted piles of books. His house, like his life, was stuck in transition. "My hatches are battened. Fire away."

Giles folded the letter back on its creases and glanced it over once more, in the futile hope that the words would have changed since his last look. In the lull of his momentary hesitation, Spike stuck his head out of the kitchen and held up a box of Weetabix. "You're scarpering off soon, so you won't be needing this, right?"

Giles's face went stony. He really hadn't expected Spike to be here for this, if for no other reason than that it was the middle of the day. When he'd opened the door to Buffy's knock, there Spike'd been on the porch behind her, looking as if he'd had a day at the beach sans sunscreen. Last night's rain showers had evolved into a sullen grey overcast. Exactly what was needed; more excuse for Spike to lark about in the daytime. More irritation crept into his voice than he intended. "If you can tear your attention away from the larder for five minutes, Spike... sit."

Spike's brows twitched, but he stuffed the box back into the kitchen cupboard and prowled back into the living room. He collapsed into a boneless sprawl beside Buffy on the couch, near arm flung over the back of the couch behind her, thumb and forefinger brushing the nape of her neck, playing with the wisps of fine tawny hair. It was a gesture unselfconsciously intimate, as was Buffy's slight list backwards into his hand. _You should want to kill him for that,_ the cool, analytical part of Giles's mind reminded him. _You should have killed him years ago, really. If you could doom Ben for the crime of having been born Glory's vessel, how much more does this creature deserve execution?_

He couldn't call up the old certainty where Spike was concerned any longer. He had always questioned Buffy's insistence upon sparing Spike's life in exchange for the assistance, willing or unwilling, he'd given them over the years. One killed vampires, one did not associate with them. Foolish, dangerous sentiment sprang from such familiarity, of succumbing to the fallacy that a vampire was a person with human loyalties, human loves, rather than a thing bred of chaos which would, sooner or later, be driven by its nature to destroy one. To his chagrin, it was a fallacy he found himself increasingly prone to. There was no way this liaison between the living and the dead could end well. It was his duty to protect his Slayer from less tangible dangers than the ones she faced nightly. But he watched Spike's thumb move along her hairline, and the slight curve of her lips, and knew in his bones the reason he would not object to Spike's presence.

He cleared his throat. "I'll spare you Travers's overview of the last five centuries of precedent regarding Council support of Slayers. Here we are. '...in short, it has always been the responsibility of the Watcher to ensure that his Slayer is adequately fed, clothed, and housed. After reviewing the terms of your salary and making inquiries into the cost of living in your area, we have determined that your current financial arrangements with us are sufficient to the task, assuming of course that due economy is practiced--'" Giles held up another sheet of paper. "How thoughtful--he's included a budget. 'Therefore we must regretfully decline your request to issue a separate living allowance to Buffy Summers--'"

"'Cordially yours, Quentin Travers, enormous git,'" Spike growled. He scratched his nose, which was beginning to peel.

Giles set the letter down on the coffee table and began polishing his glasses. "Excellent summation."

Buffy forced a chipper look. "It's not as if we expected them to go along quietly. We'll just have to--I mean, we can have Anya do accountanty stuff, can't we, and show them that their figures are all wrong?"

Giles shook his head. "I've already gone over them twice, and Travers is quite correct--I could support you if put to it. I cannot, however, support your sister, your house, and yours and Dawn's future education, as such frivolous items are not included in Travers's idea of due economy." He sat back in the chair and rubbed his eyes, deciding not to mention Travers's implication that if he returned to England as planned, he'd be taking a cut in salary as he'd no longer be Buffy's active Watcher. That felt almost just, a fit penance for his desertion.

Over on the couch Buffy glanced at Spike, her lower lip caught in her teeth. The vampire's arm dropped from the back of the couch to her shoulders and she straightened a little. Spike cocked an eyebrow at her and she shook her head ever so slightly. Nonverbal communication concluded, Buffy turned back to Giles. "All right," she said, determination coming back into her eyes. "If they want to play hardball... can I use your phone? I need to call L.A."

"Yes, of course." Giles waved her towards the phone. L.A.? The only people Buffy might be calling there were her father or Angel, and neither of them seemed likely to hold any solutions to the current dilemma. Buffy shoved one of the ubiquitous piles of reference books to one side and pulled the phone free. She tucked the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and tapped out the number quickly. Spike shot Giles an inquiring look behind her back, apparently just as much in the dark as he was.

Buffy stood tapping one foot impatiently, waiting for the phone to pick up and twirling the cord around her free hand. "Hi, Cordy? Yes, still alive again. No, I'm not--that's really none of your--Cordy! Focus! Slayer business! Angel's still in touch with Faith, right?"

Spike made a soft derisive noise at the sound of his grand-sire's name and Buffy made a shushing motion at him. "Shut up, Spike." Spike complied, but listened to the rest of the conversation with a tense attention to every nuance of Buffy's words and body language. "Not you, Cordy. I just need to get a message to Faith. The sooner the better. The Council's probably going to be contacting her soon with an offer she can't refuse, and I need her to refuse it." She rolled her eyes at whatever Cordelia's response was. "I know. I admit I wasn't Miss Junior Impulse Control. But this is vitally important."

She grabbed the letter off the coffee table before Giles could stop her, and began reading it, her eyes darting back and forth across the page. They froze on one passage and Giles saw her stiffen, an angry light joining the determination. She covered the receiver with one hand and hissed, "You didn't tell me they were trying to blackmail you too!" She handed the letter to Spike, who took it from her and squinted at it at arm's length for some minutes before looking up to regard Giles with an uncomfortable intensity.

Buffy's attention was back on the phone. "Look, just tell her the Council is out to screw us again, and don't believe a word they say, and I'll explain when I can talk to her in person. Have Angel call me with the number of the prison, and tell him not to freak if Spike answers the phone." More eye-rolling. "Yes, he does. No, I'm--just have him call me, okay? Thanks. No. No! This is me hanging up on you, Cordy... right. Later." She set the phone down and heaved an exasperated sigh. "She is so protective of him these days! I swear, if I didn't know better... urgh."

"Faith?" Giles asked. "What exactly do you have in mind, Buffy?"

"Strategy," she said with a look that might have been mischievous had it not been so deadly serious. "As president and fifty percent of the membership of Slayer's Local 101, I'm calling a strike for higher wages. Or wages period."

Giles gave her a hard look over the top of his glasses. "And you want to ensure that they don't pull strings to--"

"--break the potential scab out of stir," Spike finished.

"Exactly. Even if she still hates my guts--and big love on my part for her, believe me, not in the program--I'm betting she'll see that we're better off hanging together on this one. If I can break them she'll get bennies too."

"Surely you can't seriously intend to stop patrolling."

Buffy gave the eye-roll another workout. "Yes, Giles, Spike's corrupted me hopelessly, I care nothing for the lives of those I formerly worked tirelessly to protect--of course I'm not going to stop patrolling! I just have to make the Council think I have." She met his skeptical look with a defiant jut of her chin. "Somehow. I'm working on it! I'm new to this strategy thing. You two are both older and sneakier than I am--some help here!"

Spike leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. "Right. Old Niccolo hasn't a patch on us. So how does the Council of Wankers get the skinny on happenings in dear old Sunnyhell?"

"I send regular reports--which I could doctor, naturally." Giles stroked his chin, thoughtful. How long had it been now, since the Council had been trusted allies rather than polite adversaries? Long before Spike had started his erratic journey in the opposite direction. "But they'll have other channels as well--anything from local informants to bound demon servitors to something as prosaic as subscribing to the Sunnydale Press. Deceiving them will be no small task."

Buffy flashed Spike a little grin and elbowed him in the ribs. "Ooh, cool. Deception, fraud, and chicanery--right up your alley. Get to work." She stuck her lower lip out and shook Travers's letter in Giles's direction. "Now what's this about them going all Ebeneezer Scrooge with your salary?"

Giles snatched the letter back. "They're cutting out the field duty bonus, which is only fair as I shan't be on field duty--but since this didn't come up when I applied to come back the first time, I'm assuming that their true purpose is to coerce me into staying here to keep an eye on you. They will, of course, send someone to replace me if I leave, but I'm fairly certain it will be an observer rather than a... er... mentor." He added drily, "You have a reputation for being difficult to work with."

"They have yet to comprehend the difficulty that is me." Buffy tucked another loose strand of hair behind her ear, eyes sparking. "Giles, I hate the idea of you leaving. I think you're completely wrong about us not needing you. I'd give anything if you'd stay. But I swear I'll wear nothing but Blue Light Specials for the rest of the millennium if I let _them_ force you into it." She stood up and pulled the scrunchy off her hair. "And now I'm going to borrow your bathroom. I'm all Night Of The Living Buffy and serious renovations are in order."

She got up and headed for the hall; Giles watched her go with anxious eyes. In actuality she looked better than he'd seen her since her return; there was almost a bounce in her step as she disappeared down the hall. Across the room Spike propped one boot on top of the coffee table, his eyes following her retreating form appreciatively. Buffy Summers, dragged into the land of the living by a dead man's hand... God, but he was sick of irony. Spike's pale eyes slid back to Giles, full of sardonic challenge--and Giles looked away. _He knows_.

Spike's expression was victorious, but his words lacked bite, perhaps because he was wise enough to realize that he didn't know what kind of battle he'd won, nor why his opponent had chosen to abandon the field. "Never thanked you for the other day, Watcher," Spike said, voice pitched not to carry down the hall. "Not for me--I don't need your blessing, but it meant a lot to her, you not telling her she was barmy to be seen with me."

"Yes, well, if you cock up I'll make you beg me to kill you," Giles replied with a tight smile.

Spike tilted his head to one side and matched it with something that was a little too self-mocking to be a smirk. "If I cock up she'll beat you to it." He ran the tip of his tongue over his teeth and arched a brow. "Part of the appeal."

And that was probably the truth, Giles reflected with mild disgust. Spike didn't give him a chance to use the admission against him. "I've always thought this business of going home because you're useless was bollocks, and now I'm sure of it. So you're getting a bit long in the tooth to be out fighting nasties first-hand--you're a bloody walking library, and you've forgotten more about front-line demon fighting than the rest of those Council tossers ever knew. Useless my lily-white arse." His boot hit the floor with a thump and he leaned forward, the aspect of the demon a burning shadow behind every plane and angle of his face. "You see it, don't you, Watcher? The rest of them, they don't look, but you see it. 'A traveler betwixt life and death;/The reason firm, the temperate will,/Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;/A perfect woman, nobly planned,/to warn, to comfort, and command...'"

Giles looked down; his knuckles were white against the dark upholstery. He forced himself to unclench his fingers from the arm of the chair. "'And yet a spirit still, and bright,/with something of an angel light.' I wouldn't have thought Wordsworth your style."

Spike made an impatient gesture. "You get bored enough in a hundred and twenty years, you'll read anything. But you see it, damn your eyes, and you're leaving her anyway--why?"

What truth did he owe Spike, and why? _All he can bear, because _he_ is staying._ He kept his voice clipped and precise. "Because I've seen her die twice now, and I cannot bear it again. Can_not_. You... can. You are a braver man than I am, William the sodding Bloody, and I hate you for it."

Spike looked taken aback--had he expected something else? The vampire sat back slightly, resting his wrists on his knees. "There's fitter things you could hate me for, Rupert."

Giles took off his glasses and ran a hand through his hair--how much of the receding hairline was due to Buffy? he asked himself wryly. "Undoubtedly so. But I can't think of any of them at the moment."

"I'll wager the lapse of memory clears up right quick. Look, Watcher, you chew on this: she'll die sooner or later no matter where on the globe you've parked your arse. If it's here, it's got a better chance of being later. In fact--"

He cut himself off, looking over his shoulder at the front door. A moment later Willow knocked as she swung it open and stuck her head inside. "Hello? Giles? I thought I could get on those transcripts 'cause I'm all with the catching up--umm, Spike? You look kinda toasty. Zinc oxide. It's your friend. You guys aren't busy making me more work, are you, 'cause I thought Fridays were interview days." She came inside, edging around several boxes labeled 'MISC RECORDS' and set her laptop on the dining table. "I downloaded this trial version of some voice-recognition software from Tucows this morning, so I thought we'd see how that works--though with the accent, maybe it won't. Work. But if it does than I can take the tapes and do them at home, you know, telecommuting without the commuting--" She plugged in the laptop's adapter and flipped the lid up. "--and I hear there was a big Dawn crisis last night." A slight edge entered her voice. "I must have slept through it, as so often happens when no one wakes me up."

Buffy emerged from the hallway, looking subtlety better groomed without there being any one difference that one could point to as the reason for the improvement. She adjusted one earring. "It's no biggie, Will. Dawn's gone all West Side Story on us again. Tara was asleep when you got home, and then there didn't seem much point in waking you up for the big angst-fest."

"Of course not." Willow hit enter as if it were her worst enemy. "It's not like I could have done anything useful in my current not-useful state. Might as well let me get my beauty sleep."

"Will, it's not--"

"It's OK, Buffy. I get the logic. Needs of the many. Don't worry about it." She looked up with a bright and genuine smile. "Where's one of those tapes?"

Giles got up and went over to the tape case, and Spike rose to his feet. "Enthralling as I find the sound of my own voice, I'd best get on, see if I can find anything needs killing--not that often I can take a midday stroll in this climate. The Bit's still at home, Will?"

Willow, distracted by her struggles with the audio settings, nodded.

Buffy snorted. "She'll be at home for a long, looong time. She is more grounded than dirt."

"Right. I'll push off, then. Later, love." He kissed the top of Buffy's head, brushed his knuckles across her cheek, and headed for the door.

"Don't forget your blanket, it might clear up!" Buffy shouted after him. She turned away from the door and walked over to the table to examine Willow's setup. She hitched herself up on the table and swung her legs back and forth. "Do you think I should get him one of those big black umbrellas for Christmas, or would that just encourage him to more extra-crispy adventures? Is there any kind of anti-vamp-combustion spell, Wills?"

"If there were, vamps would be beating a path to our door and we'd be rolling in cash. Or dead. Give me a minute or so of tape to test this, Giles," Willow said.

Giles slipped the tape into the recorder and Willow plugged it into the laptop's incoming audio. He pressed the 'play' button and Spike's raspy North London accent filled the air: _"...so by this time I was off my nut with boredom--you try living in a coal mine for a month and see how you like it--so I waited till Angelus had Darla's heels about her ears one night, and I took Drusilla topside for some entertainment. We'd been living off the miners, and I wanted someone who didn't taste of coal dust for a change. So we come across this bloke, the local preacher, it looked like. He's a shrunk-up little pissant 'thout enough blood in him to get your mouth wet enough to spit, but he's not caked solid with anthracite and that's all that matters to me at this point. He asks us if we're saved--thought Dru was a tart, I reckon--and Dru, bless her mad black heart, she starts rattling off the Pater Noster, and the pruny little chap sodding near explodes yelling about us being a couple of Papists. Which is both inaccurate and annoying, as I'm C of E myself, or was when--anyway, I snap his neck, and this is the really funny part--"_

Giles hit the pause button, looking up at Buffy, who stood listening to the narration with an unreadable expression. Willow grimaced. "Um. Guess you don't want to hear that, all things considered."

Buffy shook her head. "No. But I need to hear it. I need to remember--" She took a deep breath, and her fingertips brushed her cheek. "Everything about Spike. Everything."


	15. Chapter 15

Revello Drive on a Sunday afternoon was rife with humanity--kids on skateboards, fathers out trimming hedges and seeding lawns with winter rye, old women with armloads of groceries gossiping on the corner. Spike strode down the sidewalk, a wolf in sheep's clothing--or at least, a wolf with a woolen blanket tucked underneath one arm. A few heads turned to watch him go by, but it was curiosity, not fear, that made them look. Odds were that half of them had seen him before, coming down the street of an evening or lurking about the Summers' front yard. In fact, he was certain of it, since someone had called the police on him once.

He glanced up at the sky overhead. Nothing compared to a good London pea-souper. He'd lived too long in sunny California when a few clouds were as good as a slaughter. The sky was still grey enough that he cast no shadow, but the clouds were thinning, and here and there the grey was backlit with luminous silver. Just as well that he was close to his destination. Diffuse as the sunlight was, he could feel the burn across his cheeks, a raw tingle that was just short of being actively painful, but for the moment, the only smoke he was trailing came from the butt of his cigarette. He was going to pay for this tonight, but how many vampires could say they'd gotten a sunburn?

Spike ignored the speculative looks of the neighbors and forged straight for the Summers' door, crossing the lawn with soundless feral grace and taking the porch steps two at a time. He turned before knocking, looking back over his shoulder. A boy on a beat-up dirt bike had paused in the street and was staring at him. Thirteen maybe, curly red hair and freckles. Spike smiled at him, and then growled--short, sharp and hungry. The kid's eyes bugged out of his head and his sneakered feet pawed the bike's pedals into a wild spin in his haste to be away. _Still got it._

And dealing with Dawn was going to take every ounce of it--though he couldn't quite see himself scaring her straight, anyway. He tossed his cigarette into the bushes and, after a moment's thought, tossed the blanket in after it. He rapped sharply on the door.

Dawn opened it a moment later, looking rebelliously grungy and unbrushed. She was wearing a Power Puff Girls t-shirt and headphones from which the faint, tinny sound of a studio-enhanced quartet of Leonardo DiCaprio look-alikes wailing about luuuuuuve could be heard. At the sight of him she managed to look at once pleased, disgusted, and indifferent. "Oh. It's Spike." 'The Buffy-siding-with traitor' remained unspoken but strongly implied. She started to shut the door again, but Spike grabbed the edge and held on.

"Ah, ah, ah, not unless you want to be sweeping yours truly into the rose bushes." He pointed towards the rapidly brightening sky. "Sun's coming out."

Dawn made a show of thinking about it, but finally stepped back with a perfunctory lift of her thin shoulders, as if the work of sweeping the porch outweighed the delightful prospect of Spike's becoming rose food. "Come on in." Spike made a rude gesture at the sky and dodged inside--he was all for pushing the limits till they snapped, but the actual catching on fire bits still weren't particularly enjoyable. Dawn flopped down on the couch, picked up the mixing bowl full of chocolate-coated sugar bombs she was munching her way through, and eyed him briefly before returning her attention to the Cartoon Network. "You look like a lobster with mange."

Spike prodded his cheek gingerly, wishing he had an Instamatic handy. He sat down beside Dawn on the couch, imitating her spine-contorting pose. "Yeh, well, it's that delicate English complexion. Tara about?"

"In her room." Dawn scowled at the TV screen. "You don't think anyone would actually trust me to take care of myself for five minutes straight, do you?" She oozed further down on her tailbone and looked, for a moment, poised to throw a handful of cereal at the television, or possibly at him.

"Not after last night, no."

Dawn's scowl petrified into the Wall Of Teen-Age Hostility, and she turned the volume on her Walkman up to earsplitting levels. Spike ignored it. "Just as well the wicca girl's upstairs. Rather we had a bit of privacy for this."

Dawn rolled her eyes, proof positive she was made from Buffy. "Whatever," she muttered. Spike appraised her for a moment, then snatched her earphones from her head. She shrieked and grabbed for his wrists. "Hey! Give those back!"

He held them just out of reach overhead--he wasn't going to be able to do that in another year or so, best take advantage of superior height while he still had it--and made a threatening crunching motion with one hand. "Chip doesn't give a toss about electronics, Pigeon. I told your sis I'd talk to you, so give us a listen, and then we'll both have done our duty, right?"

"Fine." Dawn went rigid against the sofa cushions, arms folded across her chest and teeth clenched, refusing to look at him. "Come on, give me the lecture." Her lips pressed hard together to still their trembling. "Tell me how stupid I've been, tell me I'm ruining my life, tell me how lucky I am Social Services isn't beating our door down right now, tell me how it's _different_ when you do it, tell me--"

He'd promised Buffy, that night last spring, to protect Dawn until the end of the world, and he'd done his best, feeble as that best sometimes was. Now and again, over the summer, it had been a tossup as to who was taking care of whom. Some things were easier to guard against than others. Spike held an arm out. "Come here." Dawn looked at him, blinking a little too hard. He crooked a finger at her. "Come here, you little nit, or I'll rip your ears off and use 'em for coasters."

"L-Like you could!" The dam broke, and Dawn fell against him sobbing, burying her head in his shoulder and tipping the bowl of Cocoa Puffs all over the couch and his lap. Spike held her, stroking her hair and murmuring meaningless broken things as she wept into his chest, and silently thanked whoever was in charge of such things that Dawn hadn't poured any milk over her cereal. He wanted, as much as he'd he'd ever desired anything an a long and passionate existence, to make this right for her....

It _wasn't _right, this. Even less right than loving the Slayer. He could justify that to himself if he tried hard enough--he'd always been love's bitch and Buffy's was simply the latest hand on his choke-chain. Whatever good he'd done for her sake didn't count in the eternal balance; his motives were all proper selfish vampiric ones, and it never would have happened without the chip anyway, so he was still all right, wasn't he? This thing with Dawn, though... It had started out innocently enough, just an attempt to get in good with her sister, but now--now an ache in Dawn's voice stirred anxious pain within his own chest, and her laughter buoyed him up as though his dead heart were anchored in her living one, to rise and fall and beat in time with her joy and her anguish.

Sitting here with her warm slim body curled against his side, her jerky sobs slowing and her breathing gradually evening out, he tried to pinpoint the moment when normal healthy bloodlust had drained away, to be replaced by this unnatural empathy. Sitting in the Magic Box, sharing the battered box of chocolates he'd been idiot enough to think he could give her sister? No longer ago than that, surely? He could have eaten her then, if the chip hadn't prevented it, if she hadn't been Buffy's sister, if he hadn't had a fond sneaking memory of big blue eyes staring defiantly at him through the bannisters three years past, as he and Buffy plotted Angelus's downfall. _Why Slayer, I didn't know you were serving hors d'oeuvres!_

She'd never been afraid of him, his Dawn. Took after her mum, and ah, what he wouldn't give to have a long talk with Joyce Summers right about now. He ran the pad of his thumb across Dawn's cheek, wiping away the tears. "It's all right, Dawn-love." Passing strange that she could find comfort in a dead man's cold embrace, in the whiskey-roughened cadences of a killer's voice. But she did; he could feel it in the set of her shoulders beneath his arm, the little hitching sigh as she scrubbed the heel of her own hand across her eyes. He smoothed a strand of long brown hair away from her eyes. "You bollocksed it up, I won't tell you you didn't, but Christ, I came this close to killing a bloke last night. I've still got you beat for villainy."

A shudder ran through her, half-sob, half laughter. "No way. Actual robbery beats attempted murder. I'm still badder than you."

He laughed outright. God, he loved this girl. "You're sorry, aren't you, love?"

Dawn snuffled, groping blindly over the arm of the couch for the box of Kleenex on the side table. "Of course I'm sorry!"

"See, there's what a soul will do for you, pet--I'm not." Spike brushed a layer of half-crushed cereal off his jeans and gave her a squeeze. "At least not for that." He pulled a crumpled linen handkerchief out of one of the duster's inside pockets and handed it to her. "Here, you may as well get some good of it. I haven't used the bloody thing since 1948."

Dawn took the handkerchief and examined it as if it were some bizarre antique device--which to her, Spike conceded, it probably was. "There's not, like, fifty-year-old vampire snot on it, is there?"

"Blow your damned nose."

She complied, folding the handkerchief carefully and tucking it into her jeans pocket when she was done. "I wish I had a chip sometimes. It's easy for you--if you try to do something bad, it zaps you before you do it. All a soul does is make you feel like crap afterwards." Dawn picked up the mixing bowl and made a half-hearted attempt to scrape the scattered flecks of chocolate into it, but gave up as it became obvious that her efforts were doing more to spread the cereal around than to consolidate it. She set the bowl on the coffee table, slumped back into the crook of his arm and sighed. "Have you ever been going along doing something that seems to be a fantastic idea, and then all of a sudden you realize it's the dumbest thing you've ever done in your life?"

Spike rested his head against the back of the couch, lips pursed, and contemplated the ceiling. "Let me think. Let Dru play Lego blocks with the Judge, because all that destroy-the-world stuff's never serious? Hire some arsewipe to torture Angel for the Gem of Amarra and then let him run off with it? Chain your sis to a wall to show her we were meant to be, because manacles are a girl's best friend? Order a robot look-alike of Buffy? Nah, I've led a life of sober restraint."

Dawn giggled weakly. "You sure have. You know what bites? I never took any of this stuff because I wanted it. I mean, sometimes I did. I know we're not starving and we've got a roof over our heads and all that crap, but there's no extra money for anything fun, ever! And every time I hint about hitting up Dad, Buffy gets this pinchy look around her eyes and it's like I'm stabbing her in the back or something."

He knew the look; it was the same one Buffy got every time he hinted that there was blunt to be had in demon-killing. Ethics were a sodding pain in the arse. Spike picked a cocoa flake off his knee and ate it. "I think it galls her she can't keep you happy on her own, pet."

"That's not it at all!" Tears started welling up in Dawn's eyes again. "She's not Mom, she can't be Mom, I don't want her to be Mom! I just want her to be my sister! She hates me, doesn't she, Spike? For helping bring her back. She just can't show it because I'm her stupid sister. She died when it should have been me, and then I--I--"

Spike grabbed her shoulders hard enough to get a warning twinge from the chip and gave her a little shake. "Stop that! Buffy loves you, Bit. She's the only person who might love you more'n I--anyone else does. If anyone's to blame for bringing her back, it's Will and me, and mostly me--Will was about to drop the idea when I cozened her into going ahead. And if I hadn't fucked up royally on the tower neither one of you'd have needed to take a header off it. So no more of this." He held her eyes until she nodded, then let his hands drop. "Look, pet, tell you what, if you really want something, I'll nick it for you. Except for any girly bits you fancy--I'm not going to perv about in the Junior Miss section pocketing unmentionables. Or boy band CDs. Or--never mind, there's nothing you'd want I'd be caught dead stealing."

She punched him in the ribs. "Oh, yeah, Buffy will go for that. I meant it when I said it wasn't the stuff. It was just... _doing _it. It was... cool. And a little dangerous. It made me feel like... like I was in charge of my life. Like I could do anything. Until I got caught."

Spike cocked his head and regarded her gravely. "Yeh, that's the feeling, all right. You know, Niblet, when you do something for the thrill of it, you've got to take the rough with the smooth. If I fancy getting my rocks off killing other vampires, I've got to take the chance of getting the shit beat out of me every other Tuesday, and waking up starkers in the middle of the UCS quad with five minutes till sunrise. Laugh all you like, it's happened. It's worth it; I'd bloody well shrivel up and die if I couldn't kill something." _Almost did._ He shivered a little, recalling the black pit of despair he'd slogged through before discovering that the chip only worked on humans. "Guess you've got to decide if the feeling you get from nicking stuff's worth the dodgy patches that come with."

"No." Dawn's reply was instant, and Spike marveled slightly. He could remember, through a glass darkly, something of what it felt like to have a conscience, but the thing itself was gone, vanished along with his pulse. Dawn looked a little wistful. "But it did feel good."

Spike laced his fingers behind his head and crossed one boot over the other, heels making little crunching noises in the spilled cereal on the table. "Well, give us a bit, pet. Maybe we can do summat about that." He glanced around. "Here--do we clean this crud up or sneak off to the kitchen and pretend Tara's walking hairball did it?"

"Blame Miss Kitty," Dawn said decisively, getting to her feet.

Spike grinned up at her. "See, not being good's got its points."

*****

Buffy concentrated on the rhythm of her feet on the pavement, step, step, step, each foot planted safely in the middle of the concrete squares. Step on a crack, break a vampire's back. And she had, once--dropped an organ on him, smash, and left him and Dru for really truly dead in the burning wreckage. More than once over the years she'd wavered between blessing or cursing the Sunnydale Fire Department for being far more competent than their colleagues in the police force.

Funny. She'd probably caused him more lingering pain than he'd caused any of his victims. _And then I killed them, right quick_. The story of Spike's unlife, Reader's Digest Condensed version. Drusilla, mad broken thing, played with her food. Angelus and Darla had raised torture to a fine art. And Spike just... killed people. Necks snapped in a trice, throats ripped out with one quick savage flash of fangs. Preferably after a good fight, but he wasn't a fussy eater. _Not exactly new information, Buffy. We've been over this before._ Spike was a monster. _ Her _monster. Her responsibility. People had attack dogs that they were... fond of. Safe as long as they were kept under proper restraint, and put down if they attacked out of turn, and that--that was what her relationship with Spike had to be. No more accidental slippage of the B word _except it's already out and he's probably got it framed on his mantlepiece_ no admission of that other word she wouldn't even let herself think. She was in deep enough already without breaking out the shovels and heading for China.

She stopped at the foot of the walk leading up to her house, looking across the lawn through the windows. She could see figures moving behind the drawn curtains, silhouettes painted on the cloth by the living room lights. An electric thrill ran along her nerves--_Spike, right here_. Her feet brought her closer of their own accord, up the porch steps to peer through the gap in the curtains. Inside, the muted roar of the vacuum cleaner drowned out any conversation; she could see Tara shaking the wand irately at the couch, where Spike was sitting meekly while Dawn dabbed aloe vera over his sunburnt nose.

Compared to her first vampire love, Spike had always been third-rate evil, and nowadays he was practically channeling Mahatma Gandhi. Sort of. If Gandhi had been really into kicking demon ass and possessed of a not-so-secret hankering for a nice glass of O-neg after a hard night's killing. But Angel and Angelus still occupied separate corners of her mind, man and demon insuperably divided by Angel's possession of a soul. Dawn pooh-poohed the gap between soul and chip, but there was one vital difference: however much his ill-won conscience pained him, Angel wanted to keep it, and if someone offered Spike a chance to be rid of the chip... that didn't bear thinking of. The soul made it easy to love Angel, forgive Angel, place all his sins on Angelus's head. Spike, damn him, defied such compartmentalization. Man and demon were one; the Spike who traded jibes about musical taste or lack thereof with Xander, guarded Dawn like a pit bull, and set her own body on fire with a touch was the same Spike who tore through Sunnydale High turning Parent-Teacher Night into a bloodbath, the same Spike who but for the chip would have killed Ramon with equal abandon, and regret only that he'd upset her thereby.

The same Spike who knew she was watching him. He looked up and smiled, his eyes locked onto hers, ice blue meeting grey-green through the veil of glass and gauze between them. The shock ran through her anew like wintergreen and lightning. Buffy tore herself away from the window and leaned for a moment against the door, forehead pressed to the frame, fingers locked around the cold brass of the handle. Nothing supernatural about it--or no more supernatural than any other vampire ability, anyway. He could catch her scent, sense her heartbeat, something. It was a predator thing. Nothing special about the fact that the two of them arrowed in on one another like Lassie coming home. It didn't mean anything. She wouldn't let it.

She opened the door. "I'm home!" As usual when she was mired in angst, there was a spectacular lack of noticing on the part of the populace at large. Dawn ignored her entirely, intent on her patient. Tara gave her a little smile and a wave of the vacuum cleaner wand. "Has Angel called yet?" Buffy asked as she left the foyer, shouting over the roar of the Hoover.

Tara toed the off switch on the vacuum cleaner and the noise died away. "Not yet. Unless the phone rang while I was vacuuming up the cereal that Miss Kitty somehow managed to pour into a bowl, carry into the living room, and spill all over the couch." She kept a perfectly straight face, and Dawn and Spike had the grace to look sheepish.

Buffy tossed her purse onto the nearest chair. _My psych project, Dr. Walsh, is a study in guilt transference in vampires from cereal to people. I'm borrowing Hostile 17_. She looked askance at Spike--he really did look awful, as though he'd gotten a faceful of red spray-paint. With his accelerated healing, skin was already sloughing off the worst of the burnt places, which didn't improve matters any. "So--did we finally discover whether or not you freckle?"

Spike gave her a sour look and jerked away from Dawn's hand. "Steady on, you're getting it in my eyes!"

Exasperated, Dawn squeezed another dollop of lotion onto her fingers. "If you'd quit twitching it wouldn't go in your eyes, and it's your own fault for being mirror-challenged anyway, so suck it up."

Buffy sauntered over to the couch for a ringside seat. "Will's probably going to be staying over at Giles's place for dinner. They're still playing with those tapes." She sat down and hugged a sofa pillow. "I think she's really hurt that we didn't wake her up last night. I don't know what good it would have done, but..."

Spike grunted and made another futile effort to escape Dawn's ministrations. "She thinks you don't need her now that she can't sling the mojo."

"But that's--what good would magic have done?" Buffy kicked off her shoes and absently slung a foot across Spike's lap. Just as absently he began massaging her toes. _ Too boyfriendy. Must move foot. Move, foot, move!_ Her foot informed her that it was just fine where it was, thanks, and invited the other foot to join it. After a bit she began kneading Spike's thigh with her free set of toes. _Well, he did it to me. Turnabout is fair play. No, this is major badness. Ooh, behold the wonder of Buffy-logic. Letting him screw you bowlegged is fine, but a foot rub? Cobblestone on the road to hell!_

"Let's just say," Spike began doing absolutely sinful things to her instep with both thumbs, "That if yours truly were a charter member of the Geek Squad who'd become a big gun in this our demonic world through supernatural means, I'd be feeling bloody inadequate around now if those means were kicked out from under me. Doesn't matter why we didn't wake her, fact is we didn't."

"I should have thought of that." Tara wheeled the vacuum back over to the utility closet and maneuvered it in among the clutter of brooms and dustpans and half-empty tins of shoe polish. "She's told me she was shy back in high school, but it's just so hard for me to imagine Willow being insecure about anything..."

"When I first met her, Wills was the insecurity poster child. But it's been a long time," Buffy agreed. "She's changed a lot."

"It's never long enough," Spike muttered darkly. "Or, er, so I've heard. Wouldn't know myself."

"Because you've always been bad." Buffy reached over and tweaked his ear. "You know, if you're really into this I could try you out with a cucumber facial once Dawn's through with you."

Spike collapsed backwards with a groan. "Bugger off, woman, and let me suffer the fruits of my hubris in peace."

Buffy scooched closer, lips teasingly close to his ear, voice a husky whisper. "Ooh, words of more than one syllable. You know how hot that gets me?" She squealed as Spike's arm snaked round her waist and pulled her onto his lap. She wrapped her own arm around his shoulders and made herself comfortable, eliciting one of those yummy subterranean growls. _Oh, yeah, squirming around in Spike's lap still gets a reaction, all right._

"Reeeeally, pet?" How the hell did he manage to look and sound that sexy with aloe vera all over his nose? "Antidisestablishmentarianism."

She flung her head back, exposing her throat. "Take me now!"

"Just in case you're wondering, all Buffy's previous boyfriends used to offer me cold hard cash to go away at this point," Dawn pointed out from her end of the couch, where she was watching the proceedings with mildly revolted interest. "Boy, if Mrs. Kroger walked in right now..." The phone rang. Buffy jumped and Spike went tense as an overwound guitar string. Dawn snickered. "Saved by the bell."

"Not funny, Bit." The phone rang a second time. Spike cocked an eyebrow at Buffy, who tried without success to break the nervous freeze which had gripped all her voluntary motor functions. "You really want me to get that and astonish the poof, love, you'll have to move." He glanced at Dawn and reconsidered. "On second thought, don't. You're covering a multitude of sins."

"Uh," Buffy croaked. An entire scenario where Spike answered the phone flashed through her mind, complete with dramatic rising music at the part where Angel drove down from L.A. in a rage and crashed through the front door. _Goody. Forget temp work, I have a future in scriptwriting_.

Tara shut the closet door and picked up the phone on the third ring. "Summers residence. Yes, she's here. Uh... yes, he is too. Um...no...I really d-don't know... do you want to t-talk to Buffy?"

Buffy felt that little irritated line forming between her brows--what had he said to get Tara nervous enough to stutter? Tara picked the phone up and brought it closer, handing Buffy the receiver over the back the couch. She took it, panic fighting arousal in her gut. "Hello? Angel?"

"Buffy." The voice was warm, deep, familiar. Once it had been the one she compared all other voices to. Spike's eyes had gone gold and he was running the fingers of one hand lightly up and down her arm, inscribing possessive hieroglyphs on her skin. "Cordelia said you wanted to get hold of Faith?"

"Um. Want, no, need, yes." She tried swatting Spike's hand away; he captured hers instead and began kissing her palm. Slow. Soft. Tongue-tip tracing lazy circles. She swallowed a gasp. "It's a Council thing. So... you've got the number?"

"Yeah. It's right here. Let me get the Rolodex."

She listened to the muffled noises on the other end of the line and bit her tongue against the muffled noises she wanted to make herself. Was this all there was left between them? Awkward silences? It had been like that at their meeting, a week after her return. Sitting in the coffee shop, toying with their cups, staring at one another across an expanse of wood-grain Formica. Exchanging meaningless pleasantries: _Why yes, I am alive again. So kind of you to notice. Dawn's fine (she still can't stand you) Willow's fine (she dragged me back to fight a war I'll never win for a world that doesn't care) no, I can't remember much about being dead (stole that from me too) and how are you?_ Two people who'd changed each other's lives, and now all they were to one another was an uncomfortable lunch date. She'd found herself willing the hands on the clock to move. He hadn't ordered anything. Why hadn't he ordered anything? Was he trying to make their rendezvous go faster too? But no, she'd forgotten--Angel didn't eat; the coffee was a major concession.

What else could they say? _I love you?_ What point? There was no expressing that love--passion was too dangerous, friendship too painful. Can I help? But it had been clear last year, after her mother's funeral, that there were limits and bounds to that help--"As long as you need me" could not be forever. So they said nothing worth saying, and the minutes dragged by. She had grown unused to fraught silences; Spike filled them up with words. Angel dug the silences deeper.

Angel didn't eat. And she couldn't remember if he breathed in his sleep. And she had wanted very badly to go home.

"Here it is. Got a pencil?"

She started at the sound of his voice--expecting it to be lighter, harsher, tinged with the accents of other shores. "And paper, even." Tara handed her a pad of yellow Post-Its and she wrote down the number on the top sheet, underlining it twice and putting *Faith!* above it. "I'm going to call and make an appointment to see her as soon as I can--can you come along if I give you a few days' warning? I don't think there's a trusting, friendly vibe there since she stole my body."

Angel sighed. "Buffy--"

She was shot through with a bolt of pure hatred for that tone of voice--oh, so reasonable, oh, so adult. He'd defend Faith. Of course. "Love, give, forgive, I know the drill." Had it been too much to ask, after Faith had stolen her body, stolen Riley, stolen her life, that Angel take her side for once, without getting all noble and redeemy? She wasn't stupid. She knew that saving Faith was all about saving himself. _I wanted you to be about saving **me.**_ She could feel herself getting tense and quivery, and the rhythm of Spike's hand stroking her arm shifted suddenly from erotic to sexless comfort. She took a deep breath. Maybe she should hang out with Anya more--someone who knew the value of a spectacular act of vengeance.

Doubt and worry threaded Angel's distant voice. "Buffy, is Spike causing problems? Because if he is, we can come up and take care of him for you--"

"No!" Was that squeaky silly-sounding thing her own voice? _Shoot me now._ "I can take care of Spike myself! And take care of? What is that? What is he, Old Yeller? You don't just 'take care' of someone--" _Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn... Stupid blinding insight._ "Sorry. Sorry. This thing with the Council's got me all nervy. Look, I'll let you know when I can get into the city to see Faith. I'll probably be driving up with Spike, just so you know." She didn't give him a chance to reply. "Talk to you later. Bye." She slammed the phone down in its cradle and let her head fall back against Spike's shoulder, feeling as if she'd just run a marathon. After a moment the tension in his body got to her, and she slitted her eyes open. Spike was watching her with eyes like the heart of a flame, radiating a simmering heat suggesting that had a minor not been present, he would have been staking his claim to her right then and there. "What's with the phone sex?" she snapped. "Were you trying to make me--"

"You didn't tell him," he said, half growling.

Without a word, Tara grabbed Dawn's wrist, pulled her to her feet and started for the stairs. "You still have homework, don't you?"

Dawn curled her lip. "Don't I always when anything interesting happens?"

As her sister's reluctant footsteps faded, Buffy aimed a tight-lipped glare at Spike. "And why should I tell him? It's none of his business. I didn't send him a memo when I started dating Riley, did I?"

"It's different. You know it's different." Citrine sparks flared in his eyes as his fingers closed round her wrists. Astonishing how very different the angry growl sounded from the happy growl or the horny growl or... Buffy felt a buried thrum of excitement at the thought that she'd actually have to exert some effort to break his grip. Spike shoved her roughly to one side, flinching slightly as the chip reacted, and flung himself off the couch and into a round of tigerish pacing.

"I told the people who matter," she shot back, and because she knew he was right and hated it, some small mean part of her was prompted to add, "and you were lucky to get that."

That struck deep, maybe deeper than she'd intended, and the raw pain in his eyes made her weak-kneed. "Think I don't know that?" His voice was bitter. "I'm properly grateful. You told the people you couldn't hide it from. The people who can pretend I'm human when it suits them. _He _knows exactly what I'm missing. _He'll _never forget what I am, and never forgive--cos it's what he is, too." He whirled round and pinned her against the couch with the sheer force of leashed rage--and it was leashed this time, no doubt there. "And you can't bloody well take the heat when it comes to Soul Boy's disapproval, can you?"

She stiffened. "You don't know anything about it."

"Oh, I know everything about it." Spike made a savage slashing gesture with one hand. "I know the Irish git walked out on you, out of the goodness of his bloody soul. I know you threw yourself at that Parker bastard--to forget _him, _ to follow his bloody orders. Be normal." He spoke the word like a curse, his voice gone mocking. "Didn't work very well, did it?"

Buffy rose slowly to her feet, eyes glittering. "My God. You're jealous. Of Angel? Of _Parker?_ That's pathetic, Spike."

"Shell of a loser, wasn't it? Of course I'm fucking jealous!" he roared. "I was so jealous then I couldn't see straight! Didn't know I loved you yet, but I knew you were _ mine!_ My Slayer, mine to kill--or not." He was in her face now, eyes blazing as the two of them circled one another, wolflike. "How d'you think it felt, watching you chase after a tosser not fit to clean your boots on, trying to drown the hurt _he _gave you, and knowing you'd take sodding Angel back in a sodding second if he lifted a soulful finger in your direction? I'd rather've put you in the bloody ground than see you crawling like that!" The muscles in his jaw clenched. "And nothing's changed, has it? You'll cross up your Watcher and your friends, give 'em the news that you're shagging the undead again--but you won't tell _ him. _You'll still jump through hoops to be his bleeding normal girl. Well, you started this, Slayer--it was your idea to jump the vampire's bones. You bloody well know what I am, and if you can't handle it then what the hell are we doing here?"

Buffy hooked her fingers into the lapels of the duster, bringing him to a halt. _Things have changed. Lots of things have changed._ "Good question," she hissed. "So what are you, Spike? Who are you? Just a vampire? _ You _ought to know if that were true we wouldn't be having this conversation!"

"Just a vampire? I'm William the fucking Bloody, baby. I pound railroad spikes through the heads of gits who annoy me, remember?"

"Do you, Spike? You know what _ I _am. And you know who I am. It's not like I can put you down like a rabid dog if the chip goes bad--you know that!" _Didn't he?_

Maybe not. Those beautiful heavy-lidded eyes bored into hers, and she could see the flare of his nostrils, feel the quick, shallow rise and fall of his muscled chest beneath her hands--_ He breathes for me._ His lips curved in an ironic smile. "Can't you? Bloody hell, Slayer, what else did you tell the rest of 'em not three days ago? I told you last year I could give up the whole evil thing for you, and I meant it. I can change what I do. I have, and I'll keep it up--chip or no chip. But I don't have a sodding soul. Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death I shall fear no evil, because yours truly is the meanest son of a bitch in the Valley. I am a vampire, I will always be a vampire, I will always get off on death and pain and destruction. That's what I am, forever and sodding ever, amen. I'll do the right thing for you, for the Bit, hell, even for Harris--I'll do it because I'm fond of this world of ours and I don't want to see the dozy old bint go smash. But I will never do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. I haven't got the wiring for it."

She was trembling violently, anger and fear and desire braided together. Three days? Hadn't a lifetime passed since then? "You said--that night--you said you were mine."

Blue eyes, drilling through her soul--not fair, when he had none. "And I am, Slayer. Yours to kill--or not."

She could not, could not bear any more space between them. _"Mine." _She pulled him down, first crushing him close, then flinging him to the couch and following fast after. Her mouth, starved for him, wrested frantic greedy kisses from his lips. Her hands cupped his face, feverishly tracing the planes of his cheeks, heedless of his burnt skin. A sound half agonized, half ecstatic, ripped from his throat and he returned her caresses with equal passion. She sank her teeth into the muscle of his shoulder and he howled, bucking beneath her as she ripped open his jeans and skinned out of her own--and didn't he have a _pretty _cock, rising all rose and ivory from the brown curls so startlingly dark against his pale skin. The whole lovely thick length of him sprang up against his flat hard belly as soon as she freed him, foreskin slipping back from the dark glistening head. He was hard for her, so hard, and oh, that glorious right-to-the-center fullness when he entered her was like nothing on earth or beyond it.

He was talking, still, as she began to move--of course he was talking, you couldn't pay Spike to shut up, ever--a steady stream of joyful profanity as her nails raked his sides and his hands dug into her ass with bruising strength, forcing her closer, forcing himself deeper: _Oh God, oh fuck, right there, that's heaven, right in that tight little cunt, that's my Slayer, that's my sweet hot bitch, ride me baby, ride me hard, oh fuck, so good, make it hurt, make it hurt just like that, come on, say it, say my name, say my name when you come, come for me come for me oh Christ oh fuck fuck fuck fuck me Buffy fuck me Buffy FUCK ME OH GOD BUFFY!_ and together they lit up the night like a Beirut Fourth of July. _ Mine. Mine. My monster. No one else's, mine, mine, mine, thou shalt have no other Slayers before me._ And they were falling, falling, raptured, transfixed, Lucifer flung from heaven and she burning in his arms. Before they struck earth she bit him again and he was instantly rock-hard within her _non-existent vampire refractory period, hurray!_ and they were rocketing out of control again, comet-bright in the darkness, and she could swear that the delirious explosions of pleasure that rocked her never ever really stopped...

*****

"You realize," Dawn said to Tara, sprawled out on the bed in he mother's old room and doodling in the margin of her geometry textbook, "That I'm scarred for life. This means guilt presents. Lots of guilt presents."

*****

"Mine," she whispered, too exhausted to stop the tears.

"Yours," he breathed. "Forever. Don't cry, love. I'm here."

She curled against him, shaking. "It's not that. It's not... oh, God, Spike, I'm--you were right. You were right."

Cool hands cradled her face, cool lips--not so cool now, warmed with her warmth--brushed her shoulder, tender, infinitely gentle. "Ah, sweet, be still, be still... Dunno what you're getting at, love."

"When you said--at Willy's, when you said I didn't care. About -about - I'm so fucking sick of saving the world! I was going to let the whole world die to save Dawn. I was. Because it was wrong to kill her, but - but mostly - because I couldn't bear to lose her. I killed myself fighting the Master. I killed Angel. I lost Riley, I lost Mom, I--Dawn was more important than the whole world, Spike!"

A long pause. "Sounds about right to me."

"But it's not." A broken sob. "How can I be the Slayer when I don't care about saving the world anymore? I got lucky. What if my blood won't work next time? When--" _ When the fact that you love me, love Dawn, to the exclusion of all else is more important to me than all you've done, all you may do?_

"But you're out there every night doing it still, love."

"Right. Just like you. And you don't care, do you?"

He jerked his head up and away, trembling, but he wasn't _quite_ strong enough to break her grip without a struggle. _ We can't escape one another that easily_. Something in him broke; she could almost hear the snap. "I don't know. I don't know anything anymore." He looked down at her. "There are--bloody hell, dozens!--of people I wouldn't feel good about killing. There's half a dozen I'd feel _bad_ about killing!" His voice was barely audible. "It's not like I'm going all brooding and poof-like--I could kill 'em, you know, sans bloody chip, and I don't think I'd weep for it afterwards. But... it wouldn't be fun. I'm starting not to care how fucking wrong it is. What if it doesn't stop there? What if some day I do start--" His voice cut off, half choked. There were some things he couldn't bring himself to say yet, either.

She reached up and smoothed the riot of sweat-soaked platinum curls away from his forehead. "Caring? Sounds about right to me." She sighed. "We're messed up."

He echoed the sigh. "We are that." He stretched, drawing her closer. "Could be worse, though. On the bright side, the shagging is bloody brilliant."

Buffy gave in to a little hiccuping laugh. Somehow he could always do that much for her. "Yeah." She tucked her head into his shoulder. Springs creaked dangerously beneath them, and something went _spung_. Buffy grimaced. _Damn. We really can't afford a new couch. Note to self: have wild passionate vampire sex only on concrete surfaces until the bloom is off the rose. Say, twenty or thirty years from now._ "I guess if you have to be messed up, you may as well be messed up with someone you love."

It took a minute, and then he drew a gasping breath as if she'd staked him. "Buffy..."

What the hell. She'd always liked going for Chinese. She raised her head and looked him in the eyes. "You heard me."

_Wow, _she thought as he dove on her and the last intact spring in the sofa noisily bit the dust, _ I finally managed to shut Spike up._


	16. Chapter 16

"It's quite simple, Quentin." Giles set his saucer on the coffee table and sank back into the armchair. "Her position is that her first responsibility is to raise and educate her younger sister, and she simply cannot afford to depend on my charity, as she puts it, to accomplish this. Unless the Council sees fit to recompense her for her work on their behalf, she has no choice but to cease patrolling and, er, 'get a real job.'"

There was a long, static-ridden pause, during which Giles reviewed his own words half a dozen times--too indifferent? Too threatening? He sat back in the armchair and took the album from the top of the stack on the coffee table, turning it over and over in his lap, and slipped the record in its inner sleeve free. Eric Clapton and Cream. The black vinyl gleamed fitfully. Bulky, fragile things, records, a bastard to ship. He could have replaced most of them with CDs, but to his mind that would have been as great travesty as replacing his library with an E-book. No tiny, shiny, digitized scrap of plastic could compare with the glory of analog sound and full-sized cover art.

Besides, he'd seen Spike's lustful glances in his record cabinet's direction, and had a good idea where half of them would end up if he did get rid of them. He was reluctantly resigned to Spike's liason with Buffy, but damned if he was going to leave his record collection to a vampire.

A trans-Atlantic sigh emerged from the hiss of line noise. "I see." Travers's tone implied that he did see; with the bulk of the planet between them, his displeasure still came through the phone lines loud and clear. "And have you pointed out to her that this decision will cost lives, even worlds?"

Giles set the album down again and picked up his teacup, taking a sip. Now for the tricky part. "Well, er, actually... she was rather worried about that. I pointed out that, technically speaking, her first death released her from her duties as Slayer. The Powers evidently intended her to be a short-timer--the Pergamum Codex had only the one prophecy regarding her, after all." He reached over and flipped the work in question open, skimming the relevant passages. How worried they'd all been, all those years ago--and over a vampire. _How quaint._ "She did say that she might try to get a little slaying in on weekends, time permitting."

There was an indistinct noise on the other end of the line. Best not get too facetious; Travers was neither stupid nor easily manipulated. No one who rose to become Head of the Council was. Giles continued, "Several of her friends and associates did offer to patrol in her stead, but I persuaded them that it was far too dangerous for normal humans to attempt this alone."

"Indeed?" Travers's voice was as dry as the California desert. "You managed adequately all summer, as I recall."

"Mmm. Yes. We managed. With the help of a vampire and a powerful witch. I'm sure you're aware that summer is the period at which vampire activity is at its lowest ebb, the Hellmouth is quiescent, et cetera. Willow is still suffering the effects of over-straining her magical abilities last month. Spike has, of course, no inclination to risk himself on behalf of innocent bystanders if it brings him no personal gain." Travers wouldn't, he hoped, start pondering the question of exactly what sort of personal gain had prompted Spike to help over the summer. "This leaves Tara McClay as our sole supernatural resource, and while she's a competent practitioner, combat spells are not her forte."

"I do sympathize with Ms. Summers's financial woes, but the Council's resources are not inexhaustible. Forty years of a Labor government--"

"Yes, yes, men living on the dole from birth to death--I grew up in the sixties, Quentin, and they've been over for quite some time now." Giles reined in his temper and stirred his tea. "Our resources are not inexhaustible, true, but neither are they anywhere near exhausted. That retreat in--"

Travers cut him off. "This is a matter of principle, Rupert, for me as much as it is for you. The Slayer is the Council's instrument--"

"The Slayer is a twenty-year-old girl who's died twice in the Council's service!"

"No, Rupert, Buffy Summers is a twenty-year-old girl." Travers's voice grew cold. "The Slayer is far more than that. She existed long before Buffy was Called and she will exist long after Buffy is dust."

"Buffy's been dust. Twice. And both times she's returned to her calling despite there being no reason for her to do so. You're right, Quentin--she isn't the Slayer. Faith is. Buffy is a good person who's been aiding our cause because she knows it to be the best use she can make of her talents. We owe her. Quentin, think. How often do we have a truly experienced Slayer at our disposal? How many survive the Cruciamentum--how many live to take the Cruciamentum? There is no comparison between the girl I met five years ago and the Buffy Summers of today. I scarcely dare imagine what she will be capable of in a few more years."

"Yes... what will she be capable of? That's the question, isn't it?" Travers said. There was a note in his voice that Giles couldn't interpret and therefore distrusted. "There are reasons for the Council exercising such control over the Slayer, Rupert, reasons that you don't--"

"Why don't you explain them to me?"

Silence again. Travers was no fool. He wouldn't drop obscure hints out of carelessness; he was on a fishing expedition of his own. "I'm not free to tell you anything I please, Rupert. But I will say this. Slayers who survive as long as your Buffy has have a tendency to become ... willful."

"Ah. Very helpful. And I'll be able to distinguish this from her normal behavior precisely how?"

"Perhaps my terminology is imprecise. Extraordinarily focused upon their work, and more vulnerable to... dangerous urges. And therefore in greater need of guidance than ever. Making a Slayer independant of her Watcher at this point is the last thing I would advise. I'll take the money matter under advisement, Rupert, but that's all I can promise you."

Giles sat there for some time after Travers had hung up, frowning into space and turning his cup of cooling tea round and round in his hands. Travers meant to make him suspicious of Buffy's behavior, he was certain, but to what end? To make him stay in America? To quash the idea of Buffy getting a separate stipend? What, from the Council's point of view, could be considered bad about a Slayer becoming more focused upon her job?

_She's already keeping company with one of them; how much more focused can one get?_ His frown deepened. Surely that couldn't be it... _Could it?_

Last year Buffy had been worried about the increasing allure that her midnight hunts held for her, and asked him to stay and delve into the origins of her powers. Joyce's illness and death and Glory's hunt for Dawn had derailed that plan before it had begun, but now... He sat back and looked about the room, at the stacks of books and half-packed boxes. Life in transition. Bloody hell.

*****

The Krallock demon's cavernous nostrils flared, and its barnacle-encrusted head swung ponderously to face the back of the room, spattering seawater all over the floor. Its damp, weed-draped form filled the entire doorway, making the utility room of Willy's even more claustrophobic, and absorbing the sound of clinking glasses and barroom squabbles that otherwise drifted back from the front of the building. "Vampire," it rumbled. "What the hell is he doing here? Bad enough the owner lets his kind into the bar."

The three demons at the table shuffled their feet (or whatever passed for them) looked uncomfortable, and examined their cards, the floor, the pipes in the ceiling--anything but the Krallock demon or the object of its displeasure. Said object tapped his cigarette into the nearby ashtray and leaned back in his chair, a faint smirk enlivening his angular countenance. Into the silence he drawled, "Playing poker, which is more than I can say for you."

The dealer's rheumy eyes took on a distressed squint, and his wrinkled, pouchy throat bobbed as he swallowed. He laid his ears flat against his skull and tried to still their nervous twitching. "He's ... uh ... Spike."

The nictating membranes slid over the Krallock's slit-pupiled, basketball-sized eyes, followed by the true lids in a contemptuous double blink. Apparently this was insufficient explanation. Spike's snide grin widened. He was enjoying their discomfiture--Clem, the dealer, wasn't so bad, but as a rule, demons despised vampires. Vampires were the lowest of the low, hybrids hopelessly tainted with humanity: fast-breeding, stupid, expendable cannon fodder. Not that this didn't sum up Spike's opinion of most other vampires as well, but he objected very strenuously at being lumped in with the common throng.

Admitting that they were a little bit afraid of a mere vampire wasn't going to win Clem and his pals any points with the big-shot out-of-town demon. Admitting that the mere vampire's propensity towards taking down big-shot, out-of-town demons wasn't an entirely unwelcome trait amongst the smaller fry of Sunnydale's demon population would win them even fewer. "I'm no ordinary vampire, mate. Scourge of Europe, done a couple of Slayers in my day, used to be the Master of Sunnydale..."

The creature in the doorway shook its head and gave a disdainful snort, perfuming the cramped room with smell of dead fish and salt. "Used to be?"

Spike's eyes narrowed a trifle. His nerves were singing with that lovely frisson of adrenaline and anticipation which presaged a fight--and just a touch of fear; Krallock demons were definitely out of his league. As usual, he fed the last emotion into more swagger. "Gave it up for Lent. You gonna ante up or stand there like a mop in need of a wringer?"

The Krallock demon gave the four of them a disdainful once-over. "I don't consort with his kind." It snorted again. "Nor do I consort with those who do." It gave Spike a last look. "Your blood is unworthy to stain my talons." With that it backed out of the doorway, its claws leaving a trail of ragged scars in the apparently worthier linoleum.

With its departure the atmosphere in the room lightened perceptibly. Spike relaxed, and Clem breathed a sigh which might have been relief. True, the Krallocks were a noble line, among the closest to pure, Ascended demons to be found on this plane. It would have been an honor to have one join them. On the other hand, they had a habit of biting off heads when annoyed, and like most pure demons, they were easily annoyed. The small fuzzy purple Skibbnir demon to Clem's left shuffled through his cards and glared at Spike, and Clem hurriedly joined in with a ferocious, wrinkly scowl. "He probably had a dozen tabbies in his brood pouch."

Maintaining face, as expected. "Just enough to cover what you owe me, eh?" Spike studied his hand--two nines, a queen, a ten and a three. Plus the jack of diamonds he'd palmed earlier, if you wanted to get technical about it. He rearranged his cards and tossed the three on the discard pile. "One. Hit me."

Clem burst into guffaws of laughter and dealt him another card. "I thought that's what you hung around the Slayer for."

The Skibbnir made a chittering noise like a forest full of demented squirrels and high-fived Clem's wrinkled, loose-skinned paw with two of its six limbs. "Good 'un, Clem!"

Spike turned his new card over and slid it into his hand. Eight of clubs. _And a good thing or you'd be eating those ears_. He exchanged one of the nines for the jack tucked away in the sleeve of his duster--vampiric speed was a wonderful thing. "Now, now, boys, no rude remarks about my lady, or I'll have to give you a refresher lesson in manners."

Purple snickered. "Your lady now, is it?"

"Me 'n the Slayer're working together now, remember." He blew a smoke ring at Purple with entirely unfeigned smugness. "Though it's not so much work these days. She's got better things to do with the undead than stake 'em."

The third demon, a spidery-thin, pearly-skinned humanoid with glittering encrustations of blue crystal scattered over its body, discarded a pair of cards and received his replacements with an impassive face. "We've heard that song and dance before."

Spike's grin got wider. "Yeh, well, you'll be hearing a lot more of it. The Slayer's finally kicked over her traces. Told the Council to piss off. She's going into a better-paying line of work."

"Uh huh," the crystalline demon said, obviously skeptical. "And we all jumped for joy when her Watcher got fired, but here they still are, making our lives miserable."

"Dealer takes two." Clem examined his new hand, cards held up before his protuberant nose. "I'm in. See your shorthair and raise you a Persian."

"I fold," Purple said with a disgusted hiss. "Your life? As if the Slayer knows you exist."

Spike focused on the crystalline demon's heartbeat (or whatever it was making noise in there) and tried to decide whether the speeding up meant he had good cards or bad ones. Clem's right ear was twitching again, and that meant he had a good hand, or was in the process of manufacturing one. Cheating was part of the game, accepted until someone felt like making something of it--they were demons, after all.

"Live and let live's my motto," Clem said. He glanced at Spike. "Present company excepted. The Slayer's never bothered with the likes of us. Vampires, greater demons... Why, my cousin Ferlie--"

"Like that Krallock demon," Spike interrupted. "Think she'd let that soggy blighter ponce about town, insultin' the locals, if she were still on the job? I'll bet you anything you care to name that come Sunday next, she won't have lifted a finger against it."

Purple and Blue Crystal looked interested. Clem shook his head, setting his jowls to wagging. "Uh uh. Last time I took one of your wagers I ended up stuck on top of a fence with my britches caught on a nail."

Spike's Cheshire Cat expression didn't waver. "You see any nails around here?"

"Done," Blue Crystal said, and the other two chimed in. "But just a friendly bet--money, no kittens."

*****

"Not exactly an encouraging conversation," Giles said, "But better than it could have gone."

"Willful?" Buffy said with a little frown. "It makes me sound like the heroine of a Gothic romance. If I get a sudden urge to run across a moor in my nightie, Giles, by all means stop me."

"They're being ridiculous," Anya said, setting the Council's letter down and sliding it across the table to Giles. "Slaying is a public service job like a police officer or firefighter, so Buffy should be making at least as much as they do at similar levels of experience. Did you point out that it's far more cost-effective in terms of lives saved to maintain one experienced Slayer than it is to constantly be training new ones?"

Willow's fingers tightened around her pencil. She forced them to unclasp, lest she snap it in half. Again. What was it about Xander that made him unerringly seek out the most annoying women in Sunnydale to fall for? It wasn't even that Anya was saying anything rude or clueless. She was making sense for once. It was just that it was Anya: all by itself, the sound of that whiny nasal voice had the ability to drill into Willow's skull and start chipping its way out with a pickaxe. She stared down at the pile of notes in front of her, trying to concentrate on anything besides the sound of the soon-to-be Mrs. Harris prattling on.

The notes were just the way she liked them: alphabetized each in their own folders with the color-coded tabs. Blue for the original spells she'd based her research on, green for the spells she'd actually used in the creation of the new one, red for the new spell itself, yellow for notes on the changes and substitutions she'd made in creating it, orange for miscellaneous additional notes which might come in handy. The pile of bright manila folders stood square-cornered on the central glass insert of the table-top, exuding that new-paper-and-glue smell which conjured up her favorite time of year, the beginning of school.

A week's worth of effort, boiled down to 'I can't do it.' Willow shuffled the stack again, unhappily aware that the nervous dampness of her palms would wilt the folders' crisp clean newness. The queasy twist in her stomach, the barely-leashed panic which made her heart pound were familiar. She had nightmares like this. She couldn't remember the combination to her locker. She'd forgotten to drop the calculus class, and now she had to read the entire semester's worth of material in the hour before the final. She was standing at the front of the classroom, stumbling through an oral report to the accompaniment of bored snickers from her classmates.

She Wasn't Prepared.

"You don't want to antagonize them more than necessary," Anya chirped, innocent of the effect she was producing. "If we can make them realize Buffy's a valuable commodity, it'll make for much better labor-management relations in the long run."

The really annoying thing, Willow decided, was that no one else was annoyed. Tara was nibbling on her pencil and sketching out one of the weird organic-looking doodles that she claimed helped her concentrate on new spells--this one looked like a cross between a bagpipe and an okra bush. Spike and Buffy were poring over a street map of L.A. spread out across the pages of _Aurelius the Seer: A Comprehensive Index of Prophecies_ and alternating between listening to Giles and an incredibly pointless argument about the best way to get to Buffy's father's apartment from the freeway. Dawn, sulking a little because she wasn't going to L.A. with them, perched on the bottom rung of the ladder up to the balcony where the restricted books were kept, knees akimbo and her nose in another grimoire. _Funny how no one gives her the fish-eye when she starts pawing through Really-Dark-We-Mean-It-This-Time Magicks. _My_ raise the dead spell didn't bring back a shambling zombie, but noooo, let Dawn at the Crowley, she'll be fine..._

Giles, who should have been annoyed if anyone should, was adjusting his glasses and nodding sagely at Anya, making little notations in the margins of the letter. He tipped the glasses down and peered over the rims at Spike. "Progress on your end?"

"Dropped a word or two to Clem and the kitten poker crowd the other night that Buffy was going into retirement, and let a few other blokes down at Willy's overhear." Spike shot Buffy a wicked smile. "It'll be all over town by tonight that the Slayer's taking a holiday."

The shop bell rang and Xander swung in with a brace of pizza boxes balanced on one hand. "Dinner is served!" he announced, plopping both boxes down in the center of the table. He planted a kiss on Anya's cheek in passing and dropped into the chair between her and Willow. _Yuck. We know you're googly-eyed over Anya, Xander, do you have to rub it in?_ "Brain food all around. We've got half veggie--and yes, I remembered the bell peppers--and half black olives and pepperoni. The one on the bottom's half ham and pineapple and half sausage and mushroom. I think that caters to everyone's unreasonable topping prejudices. Oh, and extra garlic all around just for you, Spike."

"Didn't know you cared, Harris. Ta ever so." Spike grabbed two slices of pepperoni, trailing cheese strings all over the engraving of his great-great-ever-so-great-grandsire. He handed one to Buffy and took a large bite of his own.

"Don't fill up on food before you've eaten your real dinner," Buffy admonished, accepting the offering and taking a sedate bite. "Wow. I said that with a straight face. New heights have been reached on the surreal-weirdness-of-life index."

Willow stared at the pizza. "I said _no _bell peppers, not 'extra bell peppers, the vegetable expressly designed to make Willow barf.'" She looked accusingly at Xander. "You _know _I hate bell peppers."

Xander made an embarrassed gesture halfway between a shrug and an arm-wave. "Oops. Sorry, Will. I got you mixed up with Anya. She likes 'em. But there's three other kinds."

Tara laid claim to a slice of the veggie pizza and inspected it to confirm the presence of bell peppers. "We can pick them off, honey. You know, I think they're a fruit, not a vegetable. Tomatoes are a fruit."

"Harris's Law: Anything green is a vegetable, including Jell-O." Xander watched Spike hopefully for a moment. "You're not running, gagging, or breaking out in hives. How disappointing."

Tara smiled, a teasing light in her eyes. "You know it doesn't have any effect when it's cooked."

"Hope springs eternal."

"Don't bother," Willow said under her breath, as the topic drifted farther from her torment. "The taste permeates the whole cheese-crust-tomato... complex," she waved a hand at the box, "and ruins it. It's all got bell pepper cooties."

Since no one, least of all Xander, whose fault it all was and who should have been far sorrier, seemed inclined to spring up and offer to get her a replacement pizza, Willow folded her arms and prepared to give Dawn a run for her money in the sulking department. Why the frilly heck was everyone in such a good mood when it was obvious they were all doomed? The whole scene had the Currier &amp; Ives clarity of a moment upon which she would someday look back upon with nostalgia, the last hurrah of a vanished era. She watched Tara carefully removing bits of bell pepper from a slice of pizza, and felt both touched and irritated. Strands of her lover's hair were slipping from behind her ears, falling across her face in silky wheat-blonde sheaves, and every now and again she raised a hand to tuck it back in place. Tara smiled and held out the pepperless slice, a peace offering. The gesture stirred an obscure longing in Willow, as if Tara were already an old and treasured memory rather than a real and living presence. _Once again, the big happy Scooby family, all except crotchety old Aunt Willow_. She took the pizza and managed a return smile. She had to pull herself out of this funk.

Buffy said, "Next item. Spike and I are leaving for L.A. tomorrow night, so we kick off our web of deception with a couple of days of really convincing non-slayage. We should be back Saturday night, unless Dad wants to have some family time." She didn't sound very certain that this would be the case.

Spike grunted. "Just as well. More than twenty-four hours with that wanker and I'll go spare."

Buffy wrinkled her nose at him. "We can't afford a hotel. Would you rather stay with Angel?"

"Let me think... flensing or thumbscrews... ow! Pax, love, I'll behave. Vamp's honor."

"Like that reassures me. Console yourself with the knowledge that you annoy Dad just as much as he annoys you."

"Still not so hot on the vampire thing?" Willow asked, shooting for sympathetic. _I will be mature, reasonable Willow, I will, I will..._

Buffy waved her pizza in the air and shook her head. "Oh, no, that would mean accepting that there is a vampire thing. Dad's still clinging desperately to the conviction that Spike's a victim of poor circulation and a bad UV allergy." She sighed, blowing her bangs out of her eyes. "Who just happens to be able to grow fangs at will. Dad's temperature approaches absolute zero on the 'no visible means of support and lives in a crypt' thing. I think he still has secret hopes of me marrying a nice orthodontist."

Spike finished off his pizza and licked his fingers before appropriating another slice. "He'll come round, love. It's all part of my bohemian charm."

Buffy actually giggled. "Oh, any day now." Willow tried to suppress a double-take. How long had it been since she'd heard Buffy giggle? "When I called he told me he wanted the name of your coffin supplier for the next time he redecorates."

Spike pulled her closer, nose to nose, and purred, "I'll put him in a coffin the minute you say the word, pet."

"Try it and you'll be occupying an urn right next to him, sweetie," Buffy cooed back.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Xander yelled, making a time-out sign. "I'm remembering exactly why this relationship is so twisted and sick! There will be no cutesy Eskimo kisses between Slayers and the eating-way-too-much-of-my-pizza undead in my presence! I have a delicate stomach!"

Spike smirked at him. "Yeh, I remember. Next time I'll steal an RV with independent suspension."

"Might I remind everyone that this is a business meeting?" Giles broke in. Willow decided that Giles was the only bearable person in the room.

"Business. Right." Buffy sat up and folded her hands all prim and proper on the table. "I want to get started on the Tanner thing as soon as we get back. Are we go for that?"

"Oh, yes," Tara said, nodding vigorously. "I found dozens of spells to cripple a rival's magic."

Well, of course, Willow thought. Magic was the same as anything else; it was always easier to break something than to build something. Naturally Tara would find success, and she'd **_crash and burn like the failure you are._** Tara rushed on, "The main problem's been that most of them did a lot more than that--they're spells for wizards' duels, mostly, and we don't want to hurt him."

_Speak for yourself._ The memory of her ignominious defeat at Tanner's hands still stung.

"So I've been working on isolating the magic-deadening elements from the more destructive effects, and I think I've got it pared down to what we need." Tara handed Giles and Anya a short list of ingredients. "I'll need a focal object, something we can bring him into physical contact with. We've probably got something in the shop that'll work. Anya and I can look through the inventory this weekend. I'll cast a separate binding spell on it so that once it's on, he won't be able to take it off. It'll work like a lighting rod. He'll be grounded. Any spells he tries will just fizzle harmlessly."

Buffy looked pleased. "Coolness. Will? How's your end going?"

What the clues were, Willow wasn't sure--voice a little too bright and chipper and Happy-Buffy, her expression a little too eager, perhaps--but she was instantly certain that Buffy knew perfectly well that she had bupkis to show for the last week's labor, and was covering for her out of pity. She plastered a smile across her face. "Working on it," she said. "I've got the spell altered to do exactly what we need, but there's still the whole power source problem."

"That's what you've been saying for days. Don't you think it's time to try another approach?" Anya asked. "Honestly, Willow, now that you're powerless you need to be a little more flexible."

"I am _not _powerless!" Willow's head lashed around to face her ex-demon nemesis, her eyes going liquid black as eldritch forces coiled through her body. For a brief moment she felt like herself again, as she'd felt blasting open the hospital doors. Anya jumped back in her chair, ducking behind Xander's shoulder. Tara's hand closed on her arm, Tara's anxious face brought her back a measure of calm. She relaxed, muscle by muscle, dispersing the energies she'd marshaled. She had to conserve. If she used them, she was done for the next day. "I'm... semi-powered."

"Will..." Xander looked concerned. All of them looked concerned. "You're... jumpy."

"And you need to watch where you jump," Anya grumbled. "You could curse someone's eye out."

"We've got till we get back from L.A., anyway," Buffy said. "No pressure." She hesitated, worrying her lower lip. "But maybe we should have some kind of backup plan, just in case?"

"I said I'd have it ready, and I will!" Willow snapped, then immediately dropped her head, giving the folders before her another unneeded shuffling. "Sorry. I'm just a little tired." Anya frowned at her and Willow gritted her teeth. _Just one little spell._ One little spell--no black magic, just darkish grey--would shut her up. Give her permanent laryngitis, or hiccups, or something. _One teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy spell..._ But that, as Buffy was fond of saying, would be wrong.

** _This is the same Buffy getting snuggly with the vampire?_ **

A chill raced over her and the fine hairs on the back of her neck lifted. It took a moment to muster the courage to look up, then duck back down behind her notebook. Across the room, reflected in the glass of the display cases where her own reflection should be--Willow, yet Not-Willow. Alabaster skin, cat-green eyes, hair like a fall of glowing embers, a sweet wicked Mona Lisa smile Willow had practiced in the mirror for hours and never managed to get right: the vampire version of herself whom Anya had once summoned accidentally from an alternate dimension.

Except it couldn't be, really, because they'd sent Vamp-Willow back where she came from, right? And more, the whole mirror thing. Vampires didn't reflect, so a vampire _being _ a reflection? "Pretty sure that's not normal," she muttered, then realized she'd spoken aloud as Tara looked up from her sketching, a question in her eyes. "This, um, thing." Willow grabbed the _ Index of Prophecies_ and pointed at random to one of the illustrations. "Rusnak demons have, um, three horns, and this one has, uh, three horns, so obviously I'm looking at the wrong picture, ha ha, don't mind me!"

Tara's forehead wrinkled in perplexity, and multiple transparent copies of Vamp-Willow blew her a kiss from the panes of glass. No one else noticed. Willow scarcely heard Buffy and Giles start discussing the Council situation again. _We sent you away!_

**_Oh, I never really left._** The vision in black leather and red lace got up and sashayed around the reflected table to run a languid finger along the spine of the nearest reflected book. **_I've always been... right... here._** She tapped a long-nailed finger against her chest and Willow felt an icy twinge over her own heart. _**Wrong,**_ her alter ego said, with a little moue at the reflected Buffy and Spike, who were exchanging lascivious caresses. Reflected-Buffy tossed a look of scornful amusement at her, and Willow's cheeks grew hot. _**So very, very wrong. He's still a bad, bad boy, you know. But, oh, so much fun**_ . Reflected-Willow grabbed reflected-Anya's hair and yanked her head back, trailing one blood-red nail across the bared throat. **_ We could have all kinds of fun with the little demon girl._** That smile again. **_Or anyone else._** She strolled over to the reflected Dawn, who radiated a flaring nexus of emerald-green energy, and ran her hands down over the girl's translucent shoulders. **_If it's power you need..._**

"...we can use that glamor I worked up to infiltrate Bryce's group," Tara was saying. "Then the two of you could patrol, but you'd be under cover."

"That'll be great. And oh--I had that interview with the gym today and they said they'd call back if they wanted to see me again, so be sure--"

Willow looked down, but there was no escape; that too-familiar face smiled slyly up at her from the inset glass of the table. **_Silly, isn't it? All this fuss over money, when any decent witch could enchant an ever-full purse..._**

She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head, hard, not caring who noticed or how strange it looked. When she opened them again, all she saw in the glass was her own pinched and worried face.

*****

The night was luminous around them. Only the brightest stars were visible overhead; Orion and the Great Bear made their circumference of the heavens against the lurid glow of Los Angeles, which suffused half the sky ahead of them. Headlights streamed past in an endless strobing line behind them. The wind was brisk and chill, which bothered Spike not a whit--cold was something like color for him; a thing he could easily distinguish but which made little impact on his physical comfort. Buffy, seated on the edge of the rest stop picnic table in front of him, was another story, still bundled up in her coat. Her hands burrowed under his duster, drawing leisurely revolutions over his shoulderblades, and her head rested in the crook of his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck.

Spike rocked against her, hips cradled between her thighs, each stroke slow, deep, strong, wave after languorous wave rolling in to shore. He was drowning in her, gladly, going down for the third time, caught in the rapture of the deep: Buffy Summers his ocean, and Here There Be Monsters. Buffy locked her ankles together behind him, threw her head back and arched into his thrusts. Her body clasped him in counterpoint to his rhythm, drew him deeper, his soft liquid growls and her little kitten-mew gasps lost in the roar of traffic.

It was a contest, as so many things were between them. An eternal moment in which they strove together, all their opposites reconciled in that striving, dark and light, male and female, the quick and the dead--vampire and Slayer made one greater whole, lasting as long as they could bear it. He broke first this time, shattering against some invisible high-water mark, crying out, and his capitulation triggered hers; her body clenched and trembled around him as he gave himself up to long shuddering spasms of release. She slumped backwards onto the table, gasping for breath, and he followed, unwilling to give up a fingersbreadth of contact. They lay there together for a moment, feeling the tremors of their conjoined bodies die away.

He felt a shiver that wasn't born of passion run through her, and swore softly. "Sorry, love. I'm not much use as a bedwarmer."

She smiled in the feeble imitation of darkness. "You're a pretty good windbreak." As he pulled out she made a disappointed little noise, but when he slid down her torso, nibbling at the bare goose-fleshed skin below her navel, she groaned and twined her fingers in his hair, holding him back. "No--don't start! I told Dad we'd be there before midnight. We can't get into another six-hour lust-a-thon."

The lack of conviction in her voice was absolute balm to the--well, not to the soul, but to the something--of a man taking the current love of his life to meet the former love of hers. "How about a four-hour one? It's only half an hour to L.A. from here, pet. I'm a thirsty man, and it's not your neck that's my chalice. Besides," he licked a milky streak of their mingled juices from her inner thigh and leered up at her, "I've got you all messy. Only right I should clean you up."

Buffy looked torn for a second, but another car rolled into the rest stop parking lot and her expression firmed. "That's what I brought wet-naps for." She tugged her skirt, which was rucked up about her waist, down over her hips and rolled over to grab her purse off the adjacent bench. Spike promptly ducked under the hem and followed his nose. "Here--oh--Spike, damn you, quit th-th--"

Half an hour later, virtue had prevailed, mostly, and they were roaring south along the Coast Highway, windows rolled down and the radio blasting KSPC over the howl of the wind. The DeSoto roared its challenge to lesser vehicles, which got out of the way if they knew what was good for them--fiberglass crumple zones and airbags could do only so much when pitted against a quarter-ton of solid steel. "They're playing our song, pet! '_You know you want what's on my mind, you know you need what's on my mind.._.'"

"I hear that these days they record songs with, you know, lyrics and melodies and stuff," Buffy said, mock-reflective. "Maybe we should try to find some."

"'Wind Beneath My Wings?'"

"Oh, shut up." Her lower lip slipped out in that criminally adorable pout. "That was the spell."

"Keep telling yourself that, pet." Spike tightened his arm around Buffy's shoulders, grinning up at the hunter in the sky. He had a cooler full of blood in the trunk, music that wasn't completely revolting on the radio, Buffy's head on his shoulder and her hand resting possessively across his stomach. They were headed off to see the two men in all the world he'd have been happiest to see staked out on an anthill, and he was downright giddy about it because it meant a precious few hours when he had her entirely to himself, free of the demands of friends and family and job interviews. The fact that a legitimate stop to use the loo had segued irresistibly into a nice little session of shagging didn't hurt his mood either.

It was possible that if he looked down he'd find the distant look in her eyes again--it came upon her less and less often now, which pleased him immensely, but even his ego wasn't quite up to assuming that a week's worth of slap and tickle with him was enough to get her over a little thing like being dead. He hadn't managed it in a hundred and twenty-some years, after all. He chuckled quietly and reached into his duster pocket for a cigarette, steadying the steering wheel with his knee.

"You do that a lot more than you used to," Buffy observed.

He paused in the complicated operation of lighting the fag one-handed. "What, smoke? I'll have you know between the Niblet's dirty looks and your refusal to invest in a bleeding ashtray I'm down to half a pack a day."

"No--laugh." She hitched herself up a little straighter, but stayed close to his side, maintaining contact. Over the last day or two she'd begun, almost shyly, to return his casual touches, and to initiate her own. He liked that--hell, loved it. Dru had never been one for a cuddle; she wanted petting and cosseting often enough, but like a cat of uncertain temper, she could go from purring on the hearth to clawing your arm off in half a second. Harmony had been keen on it, but he hadn't been keen on her. He wondered briefly if Megan had been serious about Harm coming back to Sunnydale for Christmas, and who he'd have to kill to prevent it from happening. "It's... nice. I don't think I saw you smile once last year--well, no... you did with Mom and Dawn."

He covered her small warm hand with his large cool one. "Didn't have a lot to smile about when you were about, sweetling, what with unrequited love on one hand and constantly being smacked in the nose on the other."

She sniffed, tossing her head. "I had issues."

"And a mean right hook." He laughed again, reveling in the steady beat of her heart and the feel of her slim, strong body against his. Her curves were as delicious to trace with hands as with eyes. Tara's not-so-subtle attempts to feed her up were starting to show results; Buffy was still thinner than he liked to see, but there was some muscle between skin and bone now, and she no longer looked as though the slightest breeze would bear her away from the land of the living. She radiated a warmth he could feel even through her coat--sometimes he thought he could feel it all the way across the room, his personal ray of sunlight. He buried his nose in her wind-tousled hair, taking in a breath imbued with the sonata of fragrances that spelled _Buffy_: body wash and shampoo and mousse, rose and strawberry and citrus and half a dozen others, and beneath it all the musky female scent that was her and her alone.

Her hand was tracing the ridged bands of muscle along his abdomen, wandering lower and lower, and parts south were starting to take notice. Less than an hour of playtime wasn't nearly enough to wear either of them out. "Love, unless you fancy learning the fine art of administering a blow job in a moving vehicle, I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Buffy jerked her hand upwards with a guilty look (or was it slightly intrigued?) but didn't remove it entirely. "Sorry. It's--seeing Faith has me wigged. I can handle Angel, but she makes me insane. And I've got to play nice. I've got to."

Spike glanced down at her, perplexed. "This isn't like you, love. What did she do to you?"

A shudder ran through her. "Nearly killed Angel."

"Ooh. My kind of girl."

Her voice went flat and hard. "Found a spell that switched our bodies. Got me locked up for crimes she'd committed, went out and played 'Hi, I'm Skanky Ho Buffy!' with everyone I knew, slept with Riley--and he didn't even know the difference!--and--"

A sudden memory of a two-years-gone night at the Bronze rose up in his head, a weird little Buffy-encounter he'd written off as the result of one of her rare attempts to drink more than one beer at a sitting. "Bloody hell, that night you told me you'd got muscles I'd never even dreamed of, and you could squeeze me till I popped like warm champagne--that was Faith?" _That turned out to be prophetic_. He swerved into the carpool lane to pass a semi and suppressed another chuckle; he didn't think Buffy would appreciate this particular irony. "I just thought you were legless. Don't think I care for this bird--you can be a right bitch, love, but you were never a cocktease. Much."

Buffy shot upright, fire in her eyes. "She told you _what? _Fine, forget diplomacy, I'm just going to strangle her."

"Do that and in twenty-four hours the Council will have a shiny new Slayer of their very own to play with."

"Oh. Right. Fooey." Buffy subsided grumpily, then bounced up in excitement. "Ooh, look! Dairy Queen, next exit!"

"You're sublimating, love."

"Thank you, Count Sigmund. Sometimes a waffle cone is only a waffle cone." She folded her arms across her chest, a frail attempt at defense. "She was... she was me. All the horrible grotty parts of me, blown up twenty times, in living color and 3-D stereophonic sound. She... _enjoyed_ being a Slayer."

He gave her the eyebrow. "And you don't?"

"Not like _that."_

"Like what? You don't love it that you're faster and stronger than everyone else? You don't love it that you can walk through the dark and fear not a single sodding beastie that makes the night its home? Christ, love, I _hope_ you enjoy it! If you could see yourself--the way your eyes light up the moment you get that little tingle that says the game's afoot! The way you move--like silk, like lightning!" She was looking at him, fascinated, revolted, entranced. "The look in your eyes when you make a kill--it's like the look in your eyes when I'm buried up to my balls in your sweet little quim and making you scream. You're alive, Buffy! So alive that--" Spike wrenched the wheel around and the DeSoto slid across three lanes of traffic to swoosh down the exit ramp. The centrifical force sent Buffy careening into his side; her knee hit the tuning knob on the radio and Mick Jagger howled _You make a dead man co-o-ome!_ Spike grinned and switched back to the alternative station.

She looked up at the exit sign. "I--I didn't think you were really going to get off."

"How the hell could I help it, love? Any lady of mine wants a waffle cone, she gets one." He craned his neck out the window, looking for the illuminated sign. "There we go."

As they sat in the drive-through, waiting for change, she said, small-voiced, "That's why you love me, isn't it? You've always seen that dark part of me."

A surge of anger rose in him, at her parents, at Angel, at everyone who'd convinced her that she was ordinary, and that ordinary was a good thing to be. In a way, she was as crippled as he was, her true nature as prisoned by her own fears as he was by the chip. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "Bloody hell, Buffy, of course I have. I don't go in for safe birds, any more than you go in for safe blokes. Always seen the part of you that rushes in nightly to save crews of brain-dead gits who'd better serve the world as vamp snacks, too, haven't I? All that's best of dark and bright meets in your aspect and your eyes."

"Faith's nothing but a killer." There was challenge in her eyes now. "What if I don't want to be that way?"

He shrugged. "You are a killer, love. Just like me. Who said you were nothing but?"

She sat back against the ancient leather upholstery, frowning, the red-and white glow of the Dairy Queen sign limning her features against the umber shadows, and allowed him to gather her close again. Not happy, but neither panicking nor lashing out at the implications of what he was saying--that was a good sign, wasn't it? "Spike... do you remember... being dead?"

He flicked ash out the window. _Taking the gold in the non sequitur Olympics..._ "I've been devoting my Friday afternoons to my remembrance of being dead, pet. Barring tomorrow, when the company'll only make me wish I were deader."

She squirmed slightly in the circle of his arm, taking his hand in hers and playing with his rings, turning them round on his fingers. He noticed with an odd little thrill that the necklace she was wearing was the ring he'd given her back when, under the influence of Willow's mis-cast spell, strung on a chain--it would have to be, it was far too large for her. "I mean really dead. After Drusilla drained you, but before you... woke up as you."

He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette and let the smoke trickle out slowly through his nose. "Dunno as I can answer that one, pet. Technically, I'm not even sure it was me who died--" _Absolute terror, waking in the cramped dark confines of his coffin, gasping for breath he didn't yet realize he no longer needed. Screaming, begging, weeping for rescue that never came, until finally panic melded with an unfamiliar fury and drove him to tear his way through four inches of silk and mahogany and six feet of good English soil, to collapse bloody-handed and half-mad with fear in Drusilla's waiting arms..._ "Strike that, I'm sure it was me. But I remember the waking more than the sleeping. Maybe it's the bits of William I've lost that remember that part."

"I can't remember either." He could hear the frown in her voice. "And I should, shouldn't I? Five months. I was dead for five months. I didn't just... go out like a light, did I? If you brought me back, there had to be a me _to_ bring back, right? The spell didn't just... make up a copy or something? Or just bring back scraps and pieces?"

That was an uncomfortable question. He and Willow had known that there'd be a chance, as with any resurrection spell, that what they brought back would be something other than a whole, complete Buffy Summers. At the time, he'd told Dawn and Willow that he'd dispose of any failures, but he'd have told Willow bloody near anything at that point, and Dawn... well, he'd never had to cross that bridge, thank whatever passed for God in Heaven these days. "You're Buffy Anne Summers in all her irritating glory, love. I'd know if you weren't. Trust me on that."

The girl at the drive-through window handed him the cones, frozen yogurt swirl for her, chocolate for him. He handed Buffy's over to her and she took it, licking up the drips with sensual delight. There was still trouble in her voice. "But I'm not. I'm five months away from Buffy Anne Summers. I came back before, but that was just minutes. I keep thinking...it has to mean something, that I'm back again. Not in a prophecy way--I have to make it mean something. I always tried to do the right things, before, and I ended up--I was alone with everyone around me, and--I have to make it different this time. I know it. I feel it." She placed her palm on his chest, and for a second it felt almost as if his heart had jolted to life again. "I don't understand this, but you're part of it. You said it, last year--it's wrong, us being together. I tried all the right things, and... they weren't right. You're the wrongest thing I know, and... you fit." She looked up at him, light pooling like quicksilver in her eyes. _My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun..._ "She's taken... everything, at one time or another, and I can't lose you too. I won't. I guess the prospect of Faithness is putting me into Cave-Buffy, mark-my-territory mode. I'm sorry. Especially since I'm probably going to be a big scaredy cat about telling Angel about us--I'm going to try, but--"

Spike tossed his cigarette out the window as they pulled back onto the highway; it bounced out of sight in the rear-view mirror in a shower of orange sparks. Heedless of traffic, he bent to kiss her, breathing in rose and violet and strawberry and oranges and sweet girl-musk, made richer yet by their recent play--and fainter, but there, the mingled odors of leather and tobacco and whiskey. A satisfied growl rose in his throat. They were all over each other; they'd crawled into each other's skins, drunk each other down as surely as if blood had been exchanged. As Angel would realize the minute he inhaled. "Nothing to apologize for, love. You can mark my territory any time."


	17. Chapter 17

When Hank Summers peered through the peephole in the apartment door, Buffy was standing in the hall, just about to ring the bell a second time and caught in the act of shooting Spike a big-eyed, pleading look of the sort common to people b/begging their significant others not to embarrass them. She spun at the sound of the opening door and fixed the close-relative version of the big-eyed look on Hank. Standing there trying to keep her garment bag from slipping down her arm to drag on the floor, she looked far more like a girl primed to run interference between the Unsuitable Young Man and her father than the ultra-confident Slayer of Large Spiny Things he'd been introduced to at their last meeting. A tentative smile ventured across her face. "Dad?"

_Buffy's back_. An unlooked-for and almost painful happiness leapt up in him, and he reached forward to pull her her into a hug. Awkward; he didn't know quite what to do with his hands and hers were full of luggage, but definite father-daughter contact. "Come on in, honey. You look--you look like you've been sleeping better."

He stepped back to let her maneuver through the doorway with her bags--not the little childhood suitcase set she used to bring for the summer; he recognized them as part of an old set he'd given Joyce the Christmas before the divorce, and it gave him a peculiar twinge to see that his daughter had adopted this small token of maturity. He was about to shut the door when Spike cleared his throat sharply. He was still standing on the threshold, carrying a much smaller bag and a styrofoam cooler. "I can doss down in the hall, mate," Spike said, "but I think the tenants' association would disapprove."

For a second Hank had no idea what he was talking about. "You have to invite him in, Dad," Buffy said, matter-of-fact. "I can't do it, I don't live here."

Ah, yes. The vampire thing. Hank allowed himself to savor the thought of Spike camping out in the hallway for the duration of Buffy's visit. Buffy did him something of an injustice when she claimed that Hank had yet to accept that there was a vampire thing; Hank was aware that strange things went on in Sunnydale and that Buffy was up to her ears in them. When in Sunnydale he was willing to go along. But Los Angeles was the real world, his world, and he resented the intrusion of Sunnydale's dangerous weirdness.

Linda came bustling up full of happy-homemaker cheer, welcoming smile in place. "Hello, Buffy. I'm Linda--Linda Gutierrez." Buffy took Linda's hand with tepid politeness. "And you must be Spike. Please come in. I've heard so much about you."

Spike's half-lidded eyes raked her up and down appraisingly, and he gave her a slow smile. "Mutual." He tossed his duster in the general direction of the coat rack, ambled into the living room and set the cooler down in the middle of the floor, standing hipshot beside it, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. His sardonic blue gaze roved over the decor: tasteful cream-colored living room set, plexiglass-and-aluminum tables, bare pale walls adorned with scattered Miro prints in Art Deco frames, all resplendent in the discrete glow of track lighting--looking for something worth stealing, Hank had no doubt. "Nice place you've got here, Summers. Monotone. Suits you."

Buffy stood in the sea of white plush carpet, clutching the strap of her overnight bag like a safety line, her wide sea-colored eyes alight with nervous curiosity. Too close to Spike for Hank's comfort. In the muted pastel room the two of them were a slash of dark, vibrant color, irresistible draws to the eye. "It is nice," she said, her voice faltering a little. She hadn't seen the place since he'd redecorated, Hank realized--had it been two years? No, almost three. Perhaps she'd been expecting the comfortable (but old) furniture and bachelor clutter of her first few summer visits.

Hank closed the door. "I thought it was time for a change."

Buffy nodded and set her bags down gingerly. "It's just so different." Spike slid an arm around her waist, his hand resting on the curve of her hip, an utterly natural and absent-minded gesture far more disturbing than any deliberate attempt to get Hank's goat could have been, and she leaned into his side. The air of general and second-in-command was still in evidence, but complicated by another, more visceral connection. The air between them crackled with it.

Linda laced her fingers together, seeming as nervous as Buffy. "I was so sorry to hear about your mother," she said. "I thought about going to the funeral, since Hank wasn't able to make it, but then I thought... not such a good idea." If she wanted to bring up the subject of Buffy's purported death and mysterious re-appearance, she concealed it well--one of the things Hank admired about Linda. She knew when to avoid asking awkward questions. "I made up the couch as well as the guest bedroom. I wasn't sure if you'd, um, need both of them."

Buffy arched a brow at the couch, fitted up with sheets and several folded blankets at one end. "I told Dad that Spike and I are seeing each other."

"I decided to take that as 'we make eye contact occasionally.'" Hank sat down in the nearest armchair and picked up his half-finished glass of Scotch. He'd decided that he deserved a drink tonight. "Leave an old man his illusions."

"You're not old, Dad." Buffy moved the pile of folded blankets aside and perched uneasily on the edge of the couch, as if afraid of her slight weight leaving an impression on the pristine cushions. "Besides, I--I sleep better when I'm not alone."

"The guest bed is a double, so there's no problem if you'd both like to stay there," Linda assured her. Hank clenched his teeth and held his tongue; Linda was desperate to establish friendly relations with his children. The prospect of being a potential stepmother to someone only four or five years her junior was daunting, and arguing with her in front of Buffy wouldn't endear him to either of them. Buffy gave Linda a startled, grateful look and a tiny, microsecond smile, so perhaps it was worth it for long-term peace in the family. "Would either of you like anything?" Linda asked. She eyed the cooler ncertainly.

"We ate on the way," Buffy said.

"Special diet." Nonchalant, Spike bent over, pried the top off the cooler and pulled a gallon milk jug full of something red and viscous out of the slightly melted mass of ice cubes within. He straightened and smiled at Linda, charisma turned up to eleven. "Though I wouldn't say no to some of that Scotch. Fridge?"

"Through here," she said. Spike followed her out to the kitchen, and Linda threw a surreptitious glance at him over her shoulder. Surely she wasn't falling for Spike's line of bull? Linda had more sense than to be swayed by a pretty face and a probably-phoney English accent.

Buffy glanced at the archway leading to the kitchen. "So that's Linda. She seems... nothing like Mom. Exactly how old is she again?"

Hank took a fortifying sip of Scotch. I never ask a woman what she weighs or how old she is. What does Spike do for a living again?"

Buffy grimaced. "Point taken. I'll leave yours alone if you leave mine alone."

They sat there for a minute, neither quite sure what to say next. Linda and Spike emerged from the kitchen, Spike having been supplied with a far-too-generous glass of Hank's Glenlivet, neat. "...high in protein, iron and B vitamins," Spike was saying, straight-faced. "Swear by it. I practically live on the stuff."

Linda nodded, equally serious. "Oh, I totally understand. It's alfalfa-carrot protein shakes for me. The body is a temple. I can tell you really work on yours, but--" she shook an accusing finger at the half-empty pack of Marlboros poking out of his shirt pocket, "you do need to give up the cigarettes."

Spike dropped onto the couch beside Buffy and slid down into a boneless sprawl, one arm draped over her shoulders. "You'll get my ciggies when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers. Every man needs at least one vice to his name."

Buffy snorted, but snuggled up to him nonetheless. Hank tried not to feel ill. "Uh huh. Give up smoking and all you've got left is drinking, gambling--"

"My point exactly. Hardly enough to keep me busy all day."

Linda shared a conspiratorial look with Buffy and glanced fondly Hank. "I guess men are all the same. I'm always trying to get your father to eat healthier and exercise, but he won't listen."

Spike slapped his stomach and regarded Hank, eyes a-glitter with cheerful malice. There was no way in hell he didn't deliberately pick his t-shirts a size too small; the damned thing looked as if it had been spray-painted on. "Two hundred sit-ups a day, mate. Or three hundred. Do you a world of good."

Hank resisted the urge to suck in his gut. He was in pretty good shape for a guy on the wrong side of forty, and he wasn't going to be baited by someone on the wrong side of a hundred and forty. "It's hard to make time for that sort of thing when you're busy earning a living. I suppose if I had nothing to do besides watch 'Passions' all day..."

Two days, he reminded himself. It was only for two days. Fortunately for his temper, Buffy begged off any lengthy conversation, saying they had to get up early for tomorrow's meeting--'early' for either of them apparently encompassing any time before eleven in the morning. Hank finished his Scotch while Linda showed his daughter and Spike down the short hall to the guest bedroom. Spike quietly snagged all of the luggage before Buffy could, which irritated Hank more than anything else he'd done all evening.

"Your daughter's a very confident girl," Linda said as they undressed for bed shortly thereafter. She sat at her vanity mirror, brushing her short glossy black hair and gazing thoughtfully at her reflection.

Hank smiled wryly. "As the biological parent, I get to use the term 'stubborn.'"

Linda set her hairbrush down and began applying face cream, looking pensive. At last she completed her mysterious evening rituals, got up from the vanity and climbed into her side of the bed. "Her boyfriend's... unusual."

"As the biological parent, I get to use the term 'weird.' Not to mention rude, lazy, violence-prone and penniless." Hank buttoned his pajama top and climbed in after her. He had good reason to distrust Spike. He had a gift for sizing people up. It had stood him in good stead in many a cutthroat board meeting and tricky client negotiation. It had even gotten him out of a few tight places outside the world of business, times when he'd been alone in a strange city with minimal command of the local language. From their first meeting that intuition had told him Spike was dangerous, not good enough for his girl--though at the time, he'd been mistaken about which girl of his Spike wasn't good enough for--and a poser. So far he'd seen no reason to change the assessment. Unfortunately that same intuition told him that the rude, lazy, violence-prone, penniless poser was also ferociously devoted to both his daughters, and better equipped to aid Buffy in dealing with Sunnydale's dangerous weirdness than he was--and that, if he were honest with himself, was the main thing fueling his dislike of the vampire.

"Buffy asked you to invite him in. I didn't think about it earlier, but that's a little strange, isn't it?"

Hank sighed. "Hon, Spike wrote the book on strange. He's got..." How was he going to put this? "...a lot of quirks. I haven't got the first idea why Buffy puts up with him, but she does, and I just don't want to alienate her any further by arguing about it--I know I haven't done as well by her and Dawn as I should have, and she's making it difficult enough for me to make up for it as it is. At least he's not living with her."

Linda's brow furrowed, but she nodded and said no more.

*****

There were times when Anya suspected that the love of her life was not entirely onboard with the whole wedding experience.

Perhaps it was the fact that Xander could make any tuxedo collapse into wrinkles just by trying on the jacket. Perhaps it was the fact that he'd conveniently forgotten to mail the invitations for two weeks running, and after she'd bulldogged him into a trip to the post office, she'd found the ones addressed to his family stuffed behind the laundry hamper, where they'd accidentally (he assured her) fallen out of his pocket. Perhaps it was the way he cringed every time she mentioned the possibility of putting D'Hoffryn up for the night--an entirely reasonable suggestion, to her mind. It was not, after all, as if Sunnydale had any decent hotels which catered to demons. She made a mental note to check into the possibility of starting one--a nice bed and breakfast perhaps, with a view of the Hellmouth. She'd made a tidy sum selling short during the dot-com crash, and, as a patriotic resident, was looking for something close to home to invest it in. Property values in the neighborhood of the burnt hull of Sunnydale High were at rock bottom...

"Anya, can you hand me the volume of Theminius there behind the counter?" Giles asked. He was pacing by on another of his circumnavigations of the store, book in hand and glasses sliding down his nose. As he passed the counter he set the tome he'd been paging through down and picked up the new one without missing a beat. "Thank you."

The Watcher's lanky form circled round the store, through Charms and Amulets where Tara was sorting through a box of half-off gewgaws trying to find a suitable focus for her spell, past Incense and Ceremonial Candles, Herbs and Potions (Pre-Mixed) and come to a halt in front of a display of athames, frowning down at Theminius. "There is simply no connection," he muttered. "None whatsoever. We can't even be certain that the appearance of the loa is part of the overall pattern of manifestations--if there is a pattern--since it was, after all, summoned, however unconventionally. Blast it all."

Anya considered her options. Giles sounded severely vexed. Now was probably the time for a remark indicating that she was actively engaged in the research process. Fortunately she was relieved of the necessity when the shop bell rang and Mrs. Dalgliesh's blue-rinsed head bobbed inside. She was a fairly regular customer, a birdlike little woman invariably dressed in flowered chintz. She tottered up to the counter and smiled at Anya. "I'm here to pick up that pixie repellant, dear."

Anya reached down and retrieved the dark brown bottle with squirt attachment labeled "Dalgleish, twice daily, shake well before spraying" from beneath the counter and set it down with a beaming return smile. The oily liquid within sloshed against the sides. "Here you are, Mrs. Dalgliesh. Remember to store it in a dark place. You have the payment ready in full, of course?"

"Why, of course. Don't I always?" Mrs. Dalgliesh opened her ancient carpetbag purse, extracted an equally ancient wallet, and began carefully counting out bills one by one, followed by exact change in pennies. Anya approved of Mrs. Dalgliesh's protective attitude towards her cash. Be good to your money and your money would be good to you was her motto. Or one of her mottoes, anyway; Anya had never been able to see how some people got by with just one. "My Social Security check came in today, and none too soon. The nasty little things are all over the gardenias." She picked up the bottle and held it up to the light, clucking her tongue. "I hope this is enough for the big one."

Giles looked up, peering at the two of them over the rims of his glasses. "Big one?"

Mrs. Dalgliesh nodded as Anya wrapped up the pixie repellant and slid it into a brown paper bag. "I saw him last night. Much bigger than the others, though I suppose the antlers made him look taller. He blew some kind of horn at me. It gave me quite a start. And the dogs made such a mess of the flowerbeds, too."

"Dogs?"

"A dozen, at least. White with red ears, I don't know the breed. Looking for bones, I suspect; I doubt he keeps them fed. Well, I must be off. Thank you, Anya." She tucked her package into the capacious purse and tottered out the door to the renewed jingle of the bell. Giles watched her departing back, stroking his chin with one hand.

"Some sort of avatar of Herne the Hunter, perhaps?" He heaved a discouraged sigh and returned Theminius to his place on the shelves. "Just what's wanted, more random demonic activity..."

"But it's not," Anya said.

Giles adjusted his glasses. "Perhaps not random, but if there is a pattern--"

"No, no," Anya interrupted. "It's not demonic. Not a single demon involved."

For a moment Giles stood there, thunderstruck. "You're quite correct," he said slowly. "All the manifestations have been minor divinities of one sort or another--Spike and Xander said that the dragon they saw had five claws, correct?" Anya nodded. "An Imperial dragon, associated with the god-emperors of ancient China. Haitian loas, Chumash sacred bears, the leader of the Wild Hunt--specifically, human deities, from many times and cultures--" He was pacing again, excited. "But still, what does it mean? If these beings are gathering here there must be a reason for it. I've checked and double-checked all the usual texts, and while there's an extremely dicey mystical convergence coming up later this winter all signs point to its occurring further south. Whatever's causing this, it was nothing foretold in any prophecy the Council has access to, and I find that extremely disturbing."

Anya sniffed. "I don't. Exactly what good has a prophecy ever done us? It's always 'The green cloud obscures the desert' and you never know if it refers to a plague of grasshoppers or if someone's started irrigating. Or how about the classic, 'A mighty army will be destroyed?' We know something's happening, and we know it's big enough to make gods sit up and take notice. I'd rather not know how it's going to turn out, thank you; that way I can assume that we figure out what's happening and beat it."

Giles's lips quirked slightly. "That's a novel way of looking at it. But we're so short of real information I'd settle for an encouraging fortune cookie."

Anya checked off Mrs. Dalgliesh's purchase on her list of special orders to be picked up. "Why don't we just ask them why they're here?"

"Because--" Giles stopped. "You know, that just might work."

*****

Buffy woke confused, sure she was in the wrong place. The mattress was not shaped to her body, the sheets smelled of some heathen brand of fabric softener, and the light was coming from the wrong direction, seeping through curtains of the wrong shade. She lay still, animal wariness taking over while she absorbed the unfamiliar sensations of someone else's bed. Finally she relaxed. She was in the wrong place, but she was supposed to be. The comfortable weight of the arm around her middle was right, and the cool firm body curving around her own. At times like this it seemed to her that the silence that was Spike's lack of heartbeat was of a different quality from all other silences, a unique quiet that she could distinguish in an instant from any common cessation of noise. She felt his breath against her ear and the brush of his lips against her throat as he sensed her wakening. Her own breath escaped in a soft yearning moan.

"Mornin', love." His voice was just as low, rough with restrained passion. He touched her lips with a finger, forestalling her reply. "No--no noise. Not a peep. They'll hear, and we can't give your old Dad an aneurysm." She bit her lip and nodded, mystified but willing to go along. Spike glanced at the window, gauging the angle of the sun and the likelihood that its beams would strike the bed any time soon. Satisfied, he bent his tousled platinum head to her neck again, nuzzling her ear, nibbling slowly down the length of her neck from ear to collarbone and back again.

His hand drifted to her shoulder, fingers stroking feather-light along her upper arm, but he touched her nowhere else. When she started to reach blindly out for more contact his fingers tightened on her biceps, holding her still while he continued to seek out the tenderest flesh, the most sensitive skin to torment. A languid heat began to build within her, lapping outwards from her center like a wave of warm honey, making her skin tingle all over and rendering Spike's ministrations all the more exquisite. It was not long before she was writhing against the sheets, digging her heels into the mattress and biting her lips to keep from crying aloud, a willing accomplice in her own sweet torture.

Spike's breathing grew quick and harsh, deepening to a purring rasp of a growl, quickly silenced as his teeth grazed her collarbone. His lips played upwards along the long swan-curve of her throat to the angle of her jaw, agile tongue flicking against the old bite scars as if by accident. Now and again his fangs emerged for a quick playful nip, the delicate pinpricks sending sharper bolts of pleasure through the voluptuous haze enveloping her senses. She was dimly aware of his growing arousal, hard and eager against her, but the cords of her limbs were undone, all her strings cut, and all she could manage to assuage it was to grind her hips back against his. Desperate little grunts forced their way out of her, and when a hand thrust a pillow in front of her face she grabbed it and bit down on the corner as flares of light blossomed behind her eyelids, and her body dissolved a long-drawn-out upwelling of bliss.

She heard the sigh as Spike exhaled, ridding his lungs of every scrap of air. He shifted position, rolling her onto her back and covering her body with his, and then he was sinking into her with a force that made the bed shudder. They both froze for a guilty second--this was a piece of furniture they had to be careful of.

Buffy reached up and put a finger to his lips, just as he'd done to her earlier--_Be still._ He was still in game face, butting his head against hers like a cat demanding caresses; his eyes slitted in bliss as her hands moved up to stroke his brow ridges, then shot open as she put another set of Slayer muscles to good use stroking something else. As she drew him deep and closed around him exaltation washed over his face, and human features replaced demonic ones, blue chasing the gold from his eyes. It was the sexiest thing she'd ever seen, and she felt her own body gather for a second assault on the heights. With a breathless, noiseless roar, he exploded within her, and Buffy mashed her face into his shoulder to muffle her answering shout as they clawed for the summit together.

Spike twined his fingers in her hair, pulled back and gazed into her eyes, caressing her cheeks with his thumbs. Buffy made a happy little 'mm' noise and gazed back. _Bed intact. Wonderful news for furniture budget. Spike not nearly as heavy as previous boyfriends. Also very good. Could get used to waking up like this. Lost personal pronouns again. Who needs them?_ "What's the occasion?"

"Happy anniversary, love. One week today."

"Love you," she whispered, because there were no other words.

He broke out in that sweet, glorious smile, the one she'd never seen him give anyone else--as if she were the only one worthy of it, despite being the remarkably self-centered and occasionally dense Buffy Anne Summers who was desperately trying to armor herself for the upcoming meeting with her former vampire lover by having as much fantastic sex with her current vampire lover as possible. Were there expressions of hers he treasured as much? She hoped so; it would be beyond unfair otherwise. He caught his lower lip in his teeth, full of small-boy anticipation. "Got you something."

Buffy sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts. "Spike, you didn't need to--it isn't, um--" _Slayers intent on instilling virtue in morally deficient vampires should not be bouncing up and down in anticipation of probably stolen prezzies from said vampires._ "You got something? For me?"

Spike rolled over and reached over the side of the bed, rummaging around underneath for a moment. He sat back up with a small flat package wrapped up in butcher's paper and tied with string--not exactly festive, but Buffy felt her hand shaking as she undid the neat double bow. She peeled back the layers of paper while Spike sat cross-legged on the bed and watched her.

It was a book--a slim volume bound in brown leather. For a second she had a weird flash of deja vu, and half expected it to be Browning's _Sonnets From The Portugese_. But it wasn't; it was the book Spike had been reading that night on the sofa in the crypt, the one she hadn't been able to make out the title of. Now, tracing the faded gilt letters on the spine, she could just decipher _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_. It was old, old enough to be printed on rag paper that had been made to last. There were two inscriptions on the flyleaf. The first was in unfamiliar spidery script, the ink faded and brown with age, and read _To William, from Mother, with love: May you know the joy you deserve. May 21st, 1877_. The second one was in Spike's handwriting, his old-fashioned copperplate script at odds with the ordinary ballpoint it was written in--_To Buffy: Seize the day. Love, William. Dec. 7th, 2001._ It looked as if he'd been undecided as to which way to sign it; 'Spike' and 'William' had both been written in and crossed out at least once. A queer lump rose up in her throat and for a second she couldn't breathe at all.

"Was gonna let you borrow it anyway, like I said, but then I thought you might like one of your own," Spike said, studiously examining his toes. "Sorry it's not a new copy, but I thought you'd rather have one that wasn't nicked."

Oh, God, she was crying. Or laughing. Not sure which. Tears were pouring down her cheeks as if her personal sprinkler system had broken. "It's--it's--" She laid the book reverently down on the pillow and flung her arms around him. "Thank you. It's perfect."

Spike, a little startled at the intensity of her reaction, pulled her close and stroked her hair. "Shh, Buffy, love, it's all right." His thumb smudged the tear-tracks across her cheek. "Your Dad'll be convinced I'm beating you now."

She sniffled. "Right. I can whip your pansy English ass."

He gave her his wickedest smile. "Promise?"

"Pig." She snuggled into his shoulder and looked up at him, an innocent little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "If you ask _very_ nicely, I'll think about it."

He laughed, and Buffy glanced towards the window, doing her own check on the progress of the sun. It must be close to eight o'clock, an ungodly hour to be awake in her line of work, but she felt surprisingly good. In the corner of her eye she saw herself in the mirror over the dresser, leaning cozily into thin air, long blonde hair apparently moving of its own volition as Spike's hand played with the sleep-tangled locks. With puffy eyes and a snuffly nose, which were absolutely not what she wanted to be displaying when Angel showed up. Which was bound to be soon--it was at least an hour's drive from Los Angeles to Corona, where the California Institute for Women was located, and there was no telling how long the wait to get in to see Faith would be once they got there. How exactly they were going to manage the matter of getting Angel from the car to the prison without combusting she wasn't sure; she couldn't imagine Angel galloping around under a ratty blanket, but he must have managed it somehow on previous visits. The California Department of Corrections wasn't about to change its visiting hours to accommodate vampires. Maybe they'd have covered parking.

Spike was still lazing around on the bed with the book he'd brought with him when she got out of the shower; he'd gotten as far as pulling on his jeans but had only buttoned them up halfway. Of course, he could afford to put off getting dressed; Spike's idea of packing light (razor, toothbrush, Penguin edition of _Typee_ , change of socks) limited his sartorial options. Manfully abjuring temptation, Buffy marched over to the closet and stood with hands on hips, surveying the clothes she'd brought along with the air of a general looking for volunteers for a suicide mission. There was the claret-red skirt and top ensemble which had been part of the Dawn-induced Dad-guilt haul last month. _Worn last night to make Dad feel better, check._ The little black dress--just in case they happened to end up at a gala L.A. cocktail party, she supposed; she really wasn't sure why she'd felt the need to bring it along. Several pairs of sensible slacks and blouses from the Office Drag Collection, for the prison visit and the ride home. She pulled the cowl-necked camel pullover out (the coffee stain had come out nicely) and held the hanger up to her chest. "Does this say 'I've moved on and am mature enough to see you as a beloved friend but if seeing me makes you rue the day you walked out on me, so much the better?' Or should I go with the blue?"

Spike leaned back against the headboard and laced his hands behind his head. "That might be a bit much for any one article of clothing to convey, pet, but I'd go for the one that doesn't conceal the massive hickey."

Buffy's eyes went wide and she dropped the pullover on a chair and darted over to the mirror, hand to her neck. Sure enough, there was a straggling line of livid rosettes winding all down the left side of her throat. They were already beginning to fade, thanks to Slayer healing, but it was going to be very visible for at least the rest of the morning. She groaned. "Why does everything that feels that good leave marks?" she grumbled.

Something brushed sensually along her shoulder, sending a wave of gooseflesh up and down her arms--Spike had slipped up behind her, invisible in the mirror, and was going in for the kill on the other side. "Suits you, pet. Sends the message that _someone_ doesn't need to puncture your jugular to get you off."

Buffy smacked him away. "Down! I have to look virginal for Dad and irresistible but unavailable for Angel and unlike a potential hacksaw-smuggler for the warden. Instead I look like Miss December in the Skank of the Month calen--oooh... STOP THAT!"

Spike beat a strategic retreat down the hall towards the bathroom, grinning like a loon, and Buffy turned back to the mirror with a silly little smile of her own and opened her makeup case. Foundation was her friend. Not like she didn't have plenty of experience concealing suspicious bruises, scrapes, and compound fractures; Slayer healing was good, but not instantaneous. She took the blue blouse out and held both of them up critically, then hung the blue one back in the closet. The camel one would cover up the marks without recourse to cosmetics. She pulled it on and tugged the collar up around her neck. On the other hand, maybe she wanted someone to see them. Collar down. Or not. Collar up. _Angel-feelings currently way more confusing than Spike-feelings. A first in the Summers' cavalcade of romantic neuroses!_ She stepped into the rust slacks and pulled her hair back. French braid? Chignon?

Last night hadn't gone too badly. Sure, Spike and her father had sniped at each other for awhile, but no one had taken any mortal conversational wounds. Linda wasn't the rapacious bimbo she'd been expecting. Buffy wasn't certain how she felt about that yet, but as Linda had circumvented the not-in-my-house-you-don't argument about her sharing a bed with Spike, Buffy was tentatively inclined to move her from the 'Homewrecking Fiend From Hell' category to the 'Probably Human' category. Maybe she could even handle the one-two punch of seeing Angel and Faith in one day...

There was a hesitant knock on the door. French braid, definitely. "Yes?"

"It's me." It was Linda, sounding worried. "Are you all right?"

"As the proverbial rain," Buffy replied. "I might go so far as to say perky, which is downright unnatural at this time of day. Is something wrong?"

"Can I talk to you for a moment?"

"Just a minute--let me get decent." After a nervous glance at the bed and a few quick corrective measures--fluff one slightly toothmarked pillow, yank the blanket over the wet spot, arrange collar of pullover to cover massive hickey--Buffy opened the door. "What's up? Dad have a change in plans for tonight?" She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice; they'd planned to go out to L'Orangerie after they got back from Corona, but it wouldn't be the first time her father had decided working late was more important than spending time with her.

"No, nothing like that." Linda was fingering her necklace, turning the little gold cross over and over till the chain tangled. She was already dressed for work, purse clutched in one hand and professional veneer lacquered securely into place. "Nothing to do with your father." The sound of running water kicked in down the hall. Buffy hoped her father had gotten his shower in earlier, as she'd recently discovered that Spike would happily loiter in a hot shower until he grew gills. Linda relaxed slightly, but her voice remained low. "Spike left the bathroom door open while he was brushing his teeth, and I happened to look in going past, and I--I saw something that worried me."

That was unexpected. Unexpected was usually bad. Buffy's smile became a trifle fixed. "Saw something?" _All Spike parts property Buffy Anne Summers, individually and in toto. Flutter one wheat-grass-nourished eyelash in his direction and I'll remove your appendix through your nose, you homewrecking fiend from hell._

Linda, luckily, didn't appear to be telepathic. "It was more like I didn't see something. Something that should have been there." She bent closer and whispered, "How long have you known Spike?"

"About four years. Why?"

"Has he seemed... different to you lately? Had any personality changes?"

Buffy looked at her, brows knit. She didn't like the way this was going; she could practically hear the ominous music rising in the background. "He's gone through a lot of... I guess you'd call it self-evaluation in the last couple of years, but he's always been this annoying, if that's what you're wondering."

Linda took a deep breath, her dark liquid eyes darting back towards the hall once more. "This is going to sound really stupid, but... have you seen him go outside in the daytime lately?"

_Uh oh._ "Sure. Yesterday." _Hiding under a blanket to get to the car counts._ "Though he's, um, kind of a night person. Which is OK, because I'm a night owl myself, always burning that midnight oil--"

The other woman looked exceedingly unhappy. "You're going to think I'm insane," she whispered, "but there's a chance we could all be in terrible danger." She wrung her hands. "I think your Spike might be... part of a gang."

"Uh?" Buffy sat down on the edge of the bed. Was there any point at all in having a secret identity these days? "A gang. Of the PCP-taking, disappearing into thin air when the police arrive variety?"

"Would you take this?" Linda reached into her pocket and pulled out another small cross on a chain. "I know your father isn't religious and I don't know if you are, but it would make me feel better if I knew you had... protection."

Buffy took the cross and closed her hand around it. This was going to be awkward. "Wow. I had no idea you were familiar with the, uh, initiation signs." Not that Spike bothered to hide it much; Angel had always gone to great pains to appear human in the company of humans, but Spike, as far as she could tell, just didn't care all that much if he were outed. Which was pretty stupid in light of the fact that he was currently helpless against any human vampire hunters who took exception to his existence. They were going to have to have a little discussion about that.

Linda's café au lait complexion paled. "Then you know--but you don't realize what he could do! He looks like the man you used to know, but he's not. You've got to get away. All of us do. He's a different person now, and he could--"

"Spike can't hurt you," Buffy interrupted hurriedly. "He can't hurt anyone. Not won't, can't. If he tries he gets an electric shock strong enough to knock him flat. And anyway, he's reformed. I swear, none of you are in any danger from him."

Down the hall the sound of the shower running cut off abruptly, but neither of them noticed. There was pity alongside the fear in Linda's eyes. "You love him," she said, her words coming quick and urgent. "You think you've found some way of keeping him under control. You're fooling yourself, chica. He'll last forever. It won't. You won't. How many people did he kill before you found your fix? How many do you think he'll kill after it breaks?"

Out in the living room, someone knocked on the door, and Buffy heard the faint scrape of chair legs and footsteps crossing from the kitchen as her father left his morning coffee to answer it. Down the hall, behind Linda, Spike emerged from the bathroom with a damp towel slung over his bare shoulders, giving his hair a few last touches with one hand. He paused to listen for a second, his dark brows angled together. Then he ghosted down the hall towards them and popped up behind Linda, crooking his fingers into claws and making exaggerated biting motions. Buffy aimed a steely glare at him over Linda's shoulder. Something was putting her nerves on edge, but with Linda talking and Spike acting more than usually like an idiot...

"Look, my grandmother is a bruja down in East L.A., and she knows all about...gangs. She knows a guy who does... deprogramming." Linda produced a small, dog-eared rectangle of cardstock from her purse and held it out to Buffy. "You should look him up, fast. It's not your Spike in there anymore."

"Now there's where you're wrong, pet," Spike said conversationally. "It's always been her Spike in here." He reached over her shoulder with striking-snake speed and nabbed the business card from Linda's hand. Linda shrieked and jumped about a foot and a half in the air. Spike's lazy grin was pure predator, reminiscent of a well-fed cat unable to resist a chance to step on a mouse's tail. He held the card out and squinted at it, lounging in the doorway in such a manner as to block Linda's escape. "What the bloody hell is that, a lobster? Bet he drew the sodding logo himself rather than shell out for a graphics designer."

"Knock off the attitude, Spike," Buffy said, in the tone of offhand authority which brought him to heel far more effectively than irritation would have. "You're scaring her."

He looked down at Linda with an absurdly pleased expression. "Am I really?"

"You heard her," a familiar voice said. "Knock it off. Or I will."

Angel loomed in the doorway behind Spike, filling most of it, flexing the fingers of his right hand as if he'd like nothing better than to make a fist of it. Spike's every muscle went piano-wire tense. Topaz sparking and dying in his eyes, he turned, very deliberately, to face the maker of his maker. Buffy took the business card from his inattentive fingers. "As a matter of fact," she said with a weak smile as she handed the card for Angel Investigations back to Linda, "We've already got an appointment."

Spike and Angel faced one another, winter-blue eyes locked upon chocolate brown, and the silence in the room was so deep and pure that Buffy was surprised that the sound of her heart pounding against her ribs didn't shatter it like glass, into shards sharp enough to cut with. Her Slayer senses were keening dissonant warning; she was strongly attuned to Spike's presence these days, even moreso now than she had been a week ago, but Angel's tug on her persisted still, tiny hooks set into all her bones. The conflict was like tinfoil on a filling, and without thought she rose from the bed and laid a hand on Spike's shoulder. The physical contact soothed the jangle along her nerves almost at once, and the boiling fury in Spike's eyes cooled to a simmer. He relaxed imperceptibly. "Hullo, Peaches."

"Spike." Angel's voice was neutral. "Buffy. Your father let me in. Are we ready to--"

He stopped, nostrils flaring, and unbelief washed over his face, transforming slowly into something approaching horror as the pieces came together. His eyes flicked around the room, taking in the two sets of clothing, the rumpled sheets on both sides of the bed, Buffy's hand resting on Spike's shoulder--and what must have been, to his enhanced senses, the unmistakable and overwhelming musk of their recent lovemaking. There was a blur of motion too fast for human eyes to follow and Spike was torn from her side, slammed into the doorjamb with wall-rattling force, and pinned there with Angel's hands about his throat. A raw snarl barely recognizable as words tore out of the older vampire: "_What have you done to her?_"

"Put him down!" Buffy shouted. Angel ignored her.

Spike's eyes blazed with triumph, and his smile was as vicious a thing as Buffy'd ever seen on a human face. "Nothing she didn't beg me to, mate," he gasped--Angel's cutting off his air couldn't hurt him, but it made it difficult for him to talk. "Not that she had to beg long. My pleasure. Each and every night, all night long--agh!" His face convulsed in agony and Buffy realized with a cold shock of terror that in another second Angel was simply going to rip Spike's head off his shoulders. She lunged towards them, but Spike had already brought one knee up like a pile-driver into Angel's groin. Angel howled and staggered backwards, his grip breaking, and Spike twisted free and dove after him with fangs bared, screaming, "How does it feel, Angelus? How does it bloody feel when it happens to you?" The two of them disintegrated into a snarling, roaring tangle of fists and fangs in the middle of the carpet.

Linda screamed and ran for the living room. _Change of plans._ Buffy diverted her lunge towards the window, and in one swift motion her hand was on the curtain-pull. "If you two don't stop it RIGHT NOW you'll be vampire flambe in two seconds and I'll shovel your ashes into the same urn for eternity!"

Even that threat didn't penetrate. Buffy yanked the cord down and the curtains flew open. Sunlight flooded into the room, striking the combatants in mid-grapple. Both Spike and Angel froze, blinking into the sunlight with identical expressions of shock before pain galvanized them into motion. "Fuck!" Spike screamed, and leaped for the closet as wisps of smoke started to rise from his exposed flesh. Angel, with less flesh exposed and less familiarity with the layout of the room, scrambled to his feet and dove behind the bed after a second's panicked reconnaissance.

Buffy stood there for a moment, backlit dramatically by the morning sun, her lips pressed into a hard angry line. "Can you both move beyond being the poster boys for Neanderthal Nation for five minutes, or is that too much to ask?" she hissed.

Angel poked a wary head up over the side of the bed. "Buffy," he said in the tone that meant he was trying very, very hard to sound reasonable, "I think you have some explaining to do."

Spike inched out from behind the closet door, all glowery, sexy pout, and jerked his chin in Angel's direction. "He started it." He looked uneasily at the window and made a little curtain-closing wave with one hand. "Uh...pet, could you...?"

How was it possible that one man could make her so sublimely happy and so completely furious in the space of an hour? She stalked over to the closet and gave him a look which would have stopped a glacier in its tracks, her chest heaving. "Is that what this is? Get back at Angel week?"

His eyes fell away and his head dropped. "Don't you think we bloody well deserve it? Both of us?"

She looked across the room at Angel's dark handsome face, agonized. "It wasn't his fault. Any of it." She believed that. She had to. Angel, whose eyes never quite lost the haunted knowledge of what he had done, was not Angelus, any more than Spike was William...

"Then whose fault was it? Tell me who stole Dru's mind from her, and her heart from me? Who took your heart and froze it so cold even my hands can warm it?" The ridged brow and broadened nose of his demon-face melted back into the aquiline purity of his human one, and staring into those lucent blue eyes, Buffy realized that she no longer had any idea which of his faces was the mask. "Tell me who I can hate, Buffy! There's got to be someone."

And she couldn't do the right thing, tell him he didn't have to hate anyone, because she knew too well that there were times when you did. "It's--it's over, all that. Past. This is now." She reached up and took his face in her hands, reading the planes of his cheek and jaw like a Braille of the heart. "_We're_ now."

Right there in her father's guest room closet Spike fell to his knees, supplicant at her feet for a heartbreaking moment before wrapping his arms around her hips and burying his face in her crotch. "Buffy," he moaned.

_Whoa. Stella Kowalski moment_. For the second time that morning she found herself unable to breathe, unable to move, but for all the physical intimacy of their pose it was not lust that raced through her now--_OK, not _much_ lust_\--and for the first time she realized, like a mule-kick to the gut, that he feared losing her as deeply and terribly as she feared losing him. _Doesn't he know? Haven't I told him?_ Her hands moved blindly over his head, fingers twining through his still-damp curls. "Get up," she whispered. "Get up." Spike obeyed, rising to his feet in one lithe surge, his hands and his eyes never letting go of her. They were the only people in the room, the building, the universe.

"Buffy." Angel's dark warm voice, which had once been the one to which she compared all others, full of concern now. "Buffy, you've got to tell me what's going on here."

The tug was still there. Once those hooks were set into bone they could never truly be removed. But it had never once occurred to her to go to him first.

"Buffy!" Linda's fearful voice cried. "Are you all right?"

Buffy took a shaky breath. "I'm fine. Could you close the curtains, please? We're coming out." As the room darkened once more, she took Spike's hand, and led him out of the closet.


	18. Chapter 18

Angel had never hated Spike. In the days when Angel had been unencumbered by a soul, Spike had been a stupidly rebellious minion tolerated only because he kept Drusilla occupied when Angel had no need of her. Barely worth noticing, much less hating. When the two of them had met again three years ago, during Spike's brief and eventful tenure as Master of Sunnydale's vampire population, it had quickly become obvious that for all the outward trappings of power he'd assumed, Spike was still the same volatile mix of insecurity, viciousness, and bravado he'd always been. Soul well-lost once more, all the new improved Angelus had had to do was aim a few jibes at the soft underbelly of Spike's pride and it was like old times again, Drusilla dancing attendance on Daddy and Spike reduced to jealous, impotent fury. Easy.

Until Spike had broken all the rules, and allied with Buffy to bring Angelus crashing down. Buffy's hands had held the blade, but Spike's shadow presence had been right beside her, crowing in triumph as she thrust it home and sent the once-more-souled Angel to hell. All that came later hinged on that moment when Spike had made the decision--for proper, selfish vampiric reasons--to fight for a day on the side of light. Now Angel brooded in the sparkling, modern kitchen of Hank Summers's L.A. apartment, and tried to decide if it were finally time for him to start hating Spike.

He definitely hated the whispers, the looks, the smiles, the touches--oh, he really hated the touches, teasing and tender--the way Spike's shoulder kept brushing Buffy's, the way Buffy's hand kept meeting Spike's on the way to the salt. Spike was still indulging his bizarre addiction to human food, and was devouring a revolting mixture of scrambled eggs, pig's blood, and tabasco sauce with every indication of enjoyment. Angel had always scorned that particular affectation; who was Spike trying to fool? Now he was almost glad of it; concentrating on the repulsiveness of Spike's breakfast kept him from dwelling on the far greater repulsiveness of Spike and Buffy exchanging besotted looks, or the rancorous exchange going on in the next room.

"...knew, and you didn't _tell _me?" Linda's voice was clearly audible through the closed bedroom door.

"Tell you what? 'By the way, dear, my daughter's dating a guy with no pulse?' Why should I think you'd believe it?" Hank's voice wasn't quite as emphatic, but just as irritated. "_I_ still don't believe it!"

Spike cocked his head in the direction of the master bedroom, thoroughly amused at the discord. "Think we're going to be sleeping in the car tonight, pet?" He dunked his toast into his mug of warm pig's blood until it was sodden with gore, and tore into it with gusto.

_Don't you get it, Buffy? This is what a demon **is. **Strife is his raison d'etre._

Buffy did not get it; she just wrinkled her nose and poured herself more orange juice. "I don't know, but I hope you have a blanket in your trunk just in case. Watch it, you're dripping blood on the hash browns."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it, love."

"I'll stick with ketchup, thanks." Buffy aimed a little half-frown at Angel, the worried hostess fretting over a finicky guest. "Are you sure you don't want anything?"

Angel shook his head. "I'm fine." Any moment now his brain was going to explode with the impossibility of the situation. _I can't move on_, he'd told Buffy once. _You can. I can't._ But he'd begun to, this last summer after her funeral--not to someone else; that was impossible for someone in his circumstances, but to a place where he didn't feel her loss with every breath he didn't take. Living in a world without Buffy had proved infinitely easier than living in a world where Buffy existed and he couldn't have her. When they'd dragged her back, damn them--Willow and Dawn, anyway; Spike was already taken care of--he'd braced himself for the renewal of that old pain, but it hadn't come. The wound had finally closed, and he'd walked away from their post-post-mortem rendezvous with regret and a tremendous feeling of freedom.

Until today. It wasn't that she'd moved on--it was to whom she'd moved. "No, I take it back. I do want something. An explanation would be good."

Spike's knuckles whitened on his mug of blood and the muscles in his jaw worked. "I love Buffy, Buffy loves me, we've been shagging like minks for a week, and with luck will continue to do so for many years to come. Anything else you need to know?"

Angel watched the younger vampire with loathing, imagining that smug face beaten and bloody, eyes swollen shut, that oily smirk smashed into broken-toothed ruin... Buffy's hand closed on top of Spike's, her fingertips barely extending to the first joints of his fingers, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Angel pressed his fingers to his temples. He could feel his skull starting its slow-motion, Technicolor expansion now.

Linda's muffled tirade continued. "I can't believe you'd put us in danger like this! He could have--"

"Talked us to death?" Hank rejoined.

Spike jerked upright. "I heard that, y'wanker!"

Buffy finished her orange juice, got up, tiptoed over to the bedroom door and rapped on it. "Uh... Dad? We have to leave now."

The argument within silenced itself abruptly. "Fine, honey. I'll see you later."

Buffy aimed a stern look at Spike, who mouthed 'Do I have to?' Buffy gestured emphatically at the bedroom door. Spike sulked for a moment, then heaved a sigh and recited, "Linda, I'm sorry I scared you, I promise never to eat anyone even remotely connected to you ever, and could you please not have your grandmum uninvite me while we're gone?"

More silence, then a grudging, "I'll think about it," from Linda.

Ordeal survived, Spike got to his feet, locked his hands over his head in a contented cat-stretch, and chuckled. "Your Dad can pick 'em. Bet she's a dab hand with a battleaxe." He scooped up a random assortment of breakfast dishes and dumped them into the sink to dessicate--only semi-domesticated, then. "We're taking the DeSoto, Peaches. I'm not entrusting my flammable hide to a sodding ragtop."

Angel watched stolidly as he walked over to Buffy and hooked his arm around her waist. He felt his fists starting to curl in on themselves again, and forcibly relaxed, muscle by muscle. He wasn't going to give Spike the satisfaction of reacting further. Buffy rolled her eyes as Spike pulled her close, a little smile playing about her lips--very much aware of what he was up to, but not complaining about it. The kiss was deep, leisurely, and intense; far from prolonging it to tweak his nose, Angel got the distinct impression that the two of them had forgotten his existence entirely. They finally pulled away from one another, a reluctant, molasses-slow separation. Spike tossed his car keys into the air and caught them, shot Angel a cocky, infuriating grin, and sauntered out whistling. Buffy's eyes followed him out the door, the little smile lingering.

Angel entertained a vivid, satisfying image of running Spike over with his own car, grinding his body into red jelly on the pavement, and felt momentarily better.

Ten minutes later he stood with Buffy in the lobby of the Allman Luxury Apartments, waiting for Spike to bring the car around from the underground garage. Not by the southern exposure of the front doors, where morning sunlight streamed in through the plate-glass windows and set the brass door fixtures ablaze. They'd dodged the gleaming spears of light and crossed to the west-facing side entrance, still in deep shadow. Buffy hadn't hesitated, or checked the position of the sun. "So. You must have planned this all out pretty well ahead of time," he said with a nod at the front entrance. "Figured out all the places you can't go, all the things you can't do with a vampire in tow."

If Buffy noticed the sarcastic edge to his voice, she ignored it. "I'm all about meeting the challenge." She sounded almost cheerful about it. "They don't design buildings for daytime vampire access. This being of the good under most circumstances. Spike's scarily inventive when it comes to getting around in the daytime."

"It is scary, isn't it?" Definite oozing of sarcasm there.

Definite ignoring of oozing sarcasm on Buffy's part. He should have known there was something wrong at their awkward meeting last month, but he'd been too stunned by the fact of her return to do much but wonder at her presence. Buffy, in turn, had been tired and withdrawn. They might as well have been on different planets for all the connection they'd made. He wished he could lay it all to the anomaly of her death and resurrection, but no, this was simpler: two people apart, lives diverging day by day, month by month, year by year.

If he'd walked into this lobby today and seen her for the first time, would she arrest his eyes and heart as she had six years ago? Then it had been her innocence which drew him as much as her beauty, the terrible unfairness of this girl being made a sacrifice, sent all unawares to fight horrors beyond imagining. The slender young woman in the camel pullover was still beautiful, but no longer a child, no longer fresh and innocent and unspoiled. Death was her companion now; her eyes had seen too much of it, her hands had dealt too much of it, and now--why, God, why had he never killed Spike? It would have been so easy!--she'd taken Death into her heart. The blazing joie de vivre she'd displayed at fifteen was no more; would he notice her at all? Or would he pass by, his encounter with Buffy Summers nothing more than a moment of curiosity, quickly forgotten?

If he caught her eyes, perhaps he would pause a moment, still. The fire had dimmed, but the coals still glowed, waiting only the right breath of wind to blaze up again, the more fiercely, perhaps, for having been banked.

Buffy gave him a look as he stood brooding by the potted ficus, a quick lift of the head--pleading, almost shy, balancing lightly on the balls of her feet as if at any moment she might run to him--or away. She sought his eyes, apology in her own. "I didn't want you to find out like this," she said, quiet, sincere. "I was going to tell you. I was going to find the perfect words to explain it all, and tell you at the perfect time." She essayed a small, hopeful smile. "I haven't found the perfect words yet, but I'm pretty sure the perfect time is coming up in March, 2012."

Did she want him to accept this with no more cavil than he'd accepted Riley Finn? As if it were right and healthy, just one more instance of how she'd gone on with her life? "No time like the present. Tell me how you could do this. With Spike, of all--my God, Buffy!" Anguish tightened round his heart like barbed wire; not dead enough to ward off this pain, not yet. "Spike! You know what he is!" He strode towards her, towering over her (uncomfortable to do so; he'd grown used to looking Cordelia in the eye). His hand went to her neck, fingers tracing the fading line of bruises. "And you let him do this to you?"

Buffy stiffened at his touch. She pulled down her collar on the other side, exposing the overlapping white scars--the marks of vampire's fangs, two from enemies who'd wished her dead or defiled, the third... "And I let you do this to me," she said. Her voice was trembling, very slightly. "What I let Spike do is my choice."

Self-recrimination sprang up in his breast like a weed no amount of reason could kill: he'd been dying, she'd provoked him, no vampire in creation could have shown any more control than he had under such circumstances... but all the rationalizations in the world couldn't change the fact that none of the bite marks on that fair neck belonged to Spike. It was queerly jolting. "He hasn't..."

Buffy smiled, a mischievous little feminine smile. "Are you kidding? He got _offended_ when I brought it up, in a cute sort of punk-Victorian way. I thought he'd want to... but biting me? Not even on the radar for him. Except for those play-bites that make you go all tingly and... OK, TMI. Sorry."

Angel regarded the top of her head with bleak disapproval. "You do realize that if you ever use the word 'cute' to describe any aspect of Spike again, I will have to kill both of you?"

She took a step closer and laid a hand on his arm, earnest entreaty in her gaze. "I'm sorry. I don't want to make this hard for you. I really don't. But I can't--I can't pretend he's not important to me. I can't pretend he doesn't make me feel... whole."

"Whole? Buffy..." Angel hesitated, closed his eyes. She was still looking up at him when he opened them again, big solemn grey-green eyes searching his face, soft ripe lips parted ever so slightly... obscene, to think of their living human warmth pressed to Spike's chill dead flesh, as once they'd pressed to his. "You're right, this is your choice. But if this is the choice you're making, there's something wrong. I was in a bad place last year. The despair, the--I did some stupid things, things I regret. I thought they'd make me feel better--I thought they'd make me feel, period. But it only made things worse." Her eyes were attentive, but blank; nothing he was saying was striking any chords. He swallowed hard and forged on. "This isn't you. The Buffy Summers I know is a good person, a caring person. You can't tell me that Buffy Summers is capable of falling in love with a thing that's killed tens of thousands of people and doesn't care--that a monster like Spike is what it takes to make you whole."

He'd struck a nerve; she flinched as if every word had barbs attached. Tears welled up in her eyes and she blinked them back. "You don't understand, you can't--when I first came back... the whole world was grey, and flat, and so was I. I didn't feel good, I didn't feel bad, I didn't feel anything. At all. Everything was just... nothing. Except Spike." A shaky little laugh. "The last month's been my own personal vampire edition of _ Pleasantville_, minus the extra who looks freakily like an ex-boyfriend." She wrapped her arms around herself, and her voice fell to a whisper. "Maybe I'm not the Buffy Summers you know. Maybe Willow screwed up. And if I'm not, what are you going to do about it? Take me back and trade me in for next year's model? I never asked to come back, but I'm here and you're stuck with me--this me. And this me needs Spike. Loves Spike."

Her voice steadied, and she repeated, "I love Spike," almost to herself -was this the first time she'd said these words aloud to anyone else? "I know what Spike is. He's killed more people than I can get my mind around. Just like you." Angel started to protest, but she cut him off. "I know who he is, too. He's the one who sat with me when I found out Mom was sick. He helped me fight Glory and risked his life for my sister and stuck around after I died and helped my friends. He feeds me disgusting gooey nachos and cheats at poker and quotes Shakespeare and Johnny Rotten and watches my back and sort of repents of teaching my sister to shoplift." Her head came up, and she looked him right in the eye; the light was back in hers. "And he loves me. Spike loves me, and knows it's impossible, and is willing to fight to make it work anyway. He may be a monster, but he does a pretty good imitation of a man."

"And that's all it is. An imitation. He's not William."

She was angry, now, her gaze gone stormy. "No, he's not. I didn't fall in love with William. I fell in love with the thing that killed him. Do you think I forget that, ever?"

"Yeah, I do. I was at your funeral. I got the whole 'Spike's a good guy now, he loved Buffy, the chip's just as good as a soul' lecture from Dawn." It had shocked him, Dawn's fierce defense of Spike, almost as much as the gaunt, limping, hollow-eyed specter Spike had been at the funeral. "It's bullshit. We both know it. He's--"

"Here," Buffy said, as the DeSoto pulled up to the curb and Spike laid into the horn. "Are you coming or not?"

"Buffy... I gave up everything we had so that you could have--" _Something clean, something sunkissed and normal and good in your life. If you had to throw your life away on a vampire, why couldn't it have been me?_ But it was far too late to ask that question; he'd been the one to leave, after all--not just once, but at every turn when fate seemed determined to thrust them back together. He had a destiny, after all, more important than his happiness, or hers.

Her eyes softened, storm turned to sea-mist, and for the first time in any of the fights they'd had over that decision, he saw pity in them rather than wounded betrayal. His was not the only old wound which had begun to heal. "Yes. That's right. You gave up everything we had. And now we don't have it anymore. Please, Angel--don't break what we've still got." She turned and straight-armed the door, and after a moment Angel bowed his head and followed her out tothe curb, to the place where sunlight and shadow met.

*****

It wasn't a backup plan, Willow told herself, because she was going to come up with a miracle. She was just exploring her options. So far this option didn't look very promising.She'd been down to the Department of Social Services building with her parents half a dozen times over the summer, to deal with assorted Dawn problems, so she hadn't exactly expected marble halls and augustly bearded Viennese doctors selflessly toiling away on behalf of the indigent in libraries that made Giles's look like the Scholastic Reader Book Bus, but she hadn't expected quite so many roaches, either.

The balding, shirt-sleeved man across the desk from her smacked a dog-eared Ellery Queen paperback down on their visitor, inspected the corpse for a moment and flicked it into the trash can."Pleased to meet you, Ms. Rosenberg. Aaron Gustavsen." He offered her a large flabby hand and Willow shook it gingerly. Gustavsen sat back in his chair and rubbed his brow. "Sorry. It's like the Apocalypse in here."

"It can't--oh." A squeaky nervous laugh died on her lips. "Figure of speech, right? Because the whole plagues-of-Egypt motif?"

"Might as well be the end of the world--they've been tearing up the sewer lines over on Alpert, and the damned things have been coming up through the drains in the bathroom. We're supposed to be getting an exterminator in Wednesday." He pursed his lips. "You said you were concerned about a group of homeless people squatting on city land?"

Willow nodded. "Concerned. Very. But not in a call the police way--I want to know what can be done to un-homeless them. And I think a lot of them aren't all there."

"How many did you say there were?"

"I'm not totally certain. Maybe eight? Or... fifteen?" Willow made an apologetic gesture. "I'm sure there's not more than twenty. But they're all living in the dump, which can't be sanitary, and, you know, winter's coming and I know we're not on the Russian Front or anything, but it gets nippy. I'm worried about them. So I wanted to see if I could do anything helpful, because that's me, always helpful."

Gustavsen gave a noncommittal grunt and began shuffling through the mass of papers on his desk--case histories, forms, menus from The Pizza Guys. "Let's see. First of all, you'd have to--are you related to any of them? No? We'd need to send a caseworker to make contact with them, convince them to come into the Center on their own, and sign up for one of the transitional programs. That would be difficult. Once that's squared away, you can get them into the Grapevine Clinic for diagnosis and prescription meds, with followup to make sure they're taking them, get them into a halfway house and employment assistance program..."

Willow brightened. That didn't sound too hard. "Well--that's great! How long will that take? Can we do it tomorrow? I can take you right there, and we can round them all up!"

He stared at her for a minute, then laughed--not unkindly, but as if her enthusiasm pained him. "First of all, we'd have to assign a caseworker, and we're so understaffed right now it's not funny. Two weeks, if we're lucky. Then we'd need to make sure there's room for more people in any of the programs. What with the energy crisis last summer and the state's budget hemorrhaging to death, our DMH and PATH grants have been cut to the bone." He looked up from his papers and handed her a California Department of Mental Health pamphlet. "Three to six months, assuming no more budget cuts. They're good programs, when we can afford them."

Willow stared at the pamphlet. **_ Helping the Homeless Help Themselves!_** it said, with a happy little picture of a kindly volunteer leaning over the shoulder of a sweet old woman who looked way more together than any of the bag ladies of Willow's acquaintance. "Six months? That's..."

"What we have to deal with." A note of sympathy entered his voice. "The other option is to get yourself appointed the legal guardian of the person you're concerned about, with power of attorney. Assuming the court granted your petition, then you could have them committed to the state mental hospital. Though they're so full I don't think you could keep them there very long; they'd have to go out-patient, and someone would still need to see that they kept taking their meds... And you'd have to go through this process individually for each one of them. Believe me, I wish we could just wave a magic wand and help everyone immediately, but it can't be done." He smiled wryly."About all we could do in the timeframe you're suggesting is call the police and have them kick them out of the dump and maybe arrest them for squatting."

"I--I see. That's not really what I had in mind." Willow got up and turned to leave, dejection in every limb of her body. Halfway to the door she turned and rushed back. "Isn't there any way to speed things up?"

He smiled--wistful, almost--and wasn't that weird and disturbing in a pudgy middle-aged bureaucrat? "There's corners you can cut here and there, but three months is the best you could hope for. If you want me to put your name on the waiting list for the Sunnydale Community Outreach, that's the most comprehensive--"

"Thanks, but I've got to--this is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Talk. I've got to talk. To people--uh, relatives. And--thanks for the pamphlet."

She waved the little slip of paper at him, feeling like an idiot, and beat a hasty retreat out the door of the cramped little office before she could make a more elaborate and detailed idiot of herself--something involving tinfoil hats, maybe.

"Ms. Rosenberg!" Gustavsen called after her. Willow turned to see him standing in the doorway of his office, his scalp pink with exertion. "Some advice--don't try to deal with this on your own. I know it's heartbreaking--believe me, I know--but you can do more harm than good, especially if some of these men are mentally ill. If you want to help, volunteer at the Salvation Army or the Battered Women's Shelter, or someplace where you can learn the ropes. Please."

Willow nodded, her eyes falling to the toes of her Birkenstocks. "I understand." She turned once more and scuffed down the corridor with her book bag bumping along behind her, discouraged. She'd missed lunch to come downtown, she hadn't accomplished a thing, and--she glanced at the clock over the deserted receptionist's desk in the lobby--she was going to be late getting back to campus for her biology class if she didn't hurry. "Wave a magic wand," she muttered. "Yeah. Right." She shouldered her bag and blinked as she walked out into the bright December sunlight. The book bag thumped against her back as she trudged down the sidewalk, one sharp corner digging into her shoulder blades with every step. Poke, poke, poke. A reminder of what the bag contained, down under _Social Construction of Reality_and Jansen's _History of Art_ .

_ **In the end it all comes down to what price you're willing to pay to get what you want, doesn't it? You were wiling to give up your soul to get your friend back. Or so you claimed at the time. How much are you willing to give up to redeem a dozen lives?** _

She left the DMH building and walked across the dry lawns, past the cooing flocks of slate-colored pigeons with iridescent necks that congregated around the little hotdog carts which catered to Sunnydale's population of civil servants. There was the Municipal Court building, and Parks and Recreation, poured-concrete monstrosities dating from the '50s. Willow stopped at the fountain in the center of the square; the fountain itself was turned off, but the pool still held water, along with a selection of dead leaves and a scattering of verdigris-encrusted pennies. There was City Hall, with the Mayor's office front and center, where Buffy'd had to rescue her from the late Mayor Wilkins. She tried to remember who the Mayor of Sunnydale was these days, and failed. The Right Honorable Not-A-Wilkins. She gazed down at her wavery reflection in the water. She didn't have any change to make wishes on.

Her reflection smirked up at her. **_Is there anyplace in Sunnydale where you haven't been kidnapped and held captive at one point or another?_**

"Shut up. Shut up! Do you think I'm stupid?" Willow shouted, causing several pigeons to flutter away in alarm. She dropped the book bag on the rim of the fountain with a thump and slapped the water with her open palm, sending droplets flying and breaking the face beneath her into a thousand crazy shards. "I know what you're doing! I know what you're trying to get me to do!"

A silent laugh echoed through her head. **_Do you, clever Wicca?_** No more games. No more illusions.Just the voice. Cold and smooth and dark, like deep water, like liquid obsidian. **_Then the only question before us is, are you going to do it?_**

*****

Over the last six years Buffy Summers had developed a very firm set of rules concerning vampires, and kept them constantly in mind when dealing with Spike.

> 1\. All vampires are to be staked, immediately.  
> 2\. There will be absolutely no flirting, taunting, or barbed sexual innuendo exchanged between Slayers and chipped, helpless vampires who are not staked out of misplaced pity and consideration of previous world-saving assistance.  
> 3\. Flirting, taunting, and barbed sexual innuendo between Slayers and helpless chipped vampires will never, ever lead to furtive contemplation of what big hands he's got, Grandma, or to sweaty, naughty thoughts about the implications thereof.  
> 4\. Sweaty, naughty thoughts about helpless chipped vampires will not lead to embarrassing over-reaction when one discovers said vampire harbors similar thoughts about Slayer, at least until vampire makes tactical error of chaining one to wall and threatening to sic ravenous ex-girlfriend on one, thus justifying over-reaction.  
> 5\. Slayers will never, ever forgive vampires for stupid chaining-to-wall stunt, regardless of degree of heroic suffering endured by said vampire for self and sister at hands of excessively bitchy hell-goddess.  
> 6\. Having forgiven vampire, Slayers will never be so silly as to re-invite said vampire into her home. Having re-invited vampire into home, will not give slightest hint of encouragement to said vampire's heart-melting declaration of devotion.  
> 7\. Slayers will never use dying and returning to life as excuse for hanging out with morally deficient vampire half responsible for resurrection, no matter how impressed she may be at younger sister's tales of what vampire did on his summer vacation.  
> 8\. Hanging out with morally deficient vampire will be on purely platonic, business level only. There will be no flirting, taunting, or barbed sexual innuendo (see Rule #2); neither will there be any undue appreciation of vampire's wit, fighting ability, supermodel-grade cheekbones, muscular yet compact build, et. al. Arguments and the occasional fistfight are not to be considered expressions of sublimated passion.  
> 9\. Having succumbed to sublimated passion, Slayers will never be so idiotic as to fall in love with morally deficient vampire. Having fallen in love with morally deficient vampire, Slayers will never be so idiotic as to tell him so. Having confessed love to morally deficient vampire, Slayers will never be so idiotic as to attempt actual relationship.  
> 10\. In hammering out relationship with morally deficient vampire, Slayers will never engineer a weekend involving said vampire, previous vampire boyfriend, father, and father's vampire-phobic girlfriend. It cannot end well.

She was still working on Number Eleven, which would involve Slayers never driving long distances in the same car with current and former vampire boyfriends. It wanted polishing.

They were tooling down Highway 91 towards Corona as fast as the law allowed or a little faster, the mid-morning sunlight striking a galaxy of miniature rainbows off the DeSoto's grease-clouded windshield. Spike was wearing a pair of welder's goggles to protect his eyes from the sun--in conjunction with the black leather duster, they made him resemble a demented World War I ace. "'....rock all night, sleep all day, it don't matter what they say...'" Spike jounced up and down in the driver's seat in time to the music, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke, trailing the butt out the window. "Fuck, I love this song!"

"Is that what it is?"

"Oh, you love it too, baby! Better than that Chieftains bollocks, innit? Lights a fire under you!"

"It's gonna light a fire all over you if you don't roll up the damn window." Angel slouched further down in the back seat. "On second thought, go right ahead and leave it down. And what's wrong with the Chieftains?"

"Nothing, if your idea of good music begins and ends with 'Danny Boy.'" Spike pulled his arm back in just before his hand began to smoulder, his manic grin never wavering. "Have to roll the window down if I'm going to have a smoke around you health nuts, don't I?"

"Let's not make that literal, hm?" Buffy opened the glove compartment and pulled the Triple A map from the mess of repair receipts, broken tire gauges, and general crud, unfolded it and re-traced their route for the dozenth time. "It's the second exit, right?"

"Love, it's twenty miles yet."

"Right. Twenty miles. Ceasing to panic." Buffy started to re-fold the map. "Not that I'm panicking. Large with Zen-like calm, here." She regarded the abstract origami sculpture in her lap with dismay, gave up and stuffed the map back into the glove compartment in ignominious defeat. Spike looked at her, cigarette cocked at a jaunty angle in one corner of his mouth, and it was like fighting the magnetic pull of the earth not to scoot across the expanse of sun-warmed black leather between them and take refuge against his side, ridiculous goggles and all. That would upset Angel. On the other hand, wasn't it unfair to Spike to act based on what would upset Angel? On the third hand, Angel was doing them a favor and it would be tacky to rub his nose in her new relationship. On the fourth hand...

...on the fourth hand she was headed to see Faith and her stomach was tying itself in knots--not weenie little granny knots, either, good solid double-hitches--and after days of planning she still had no idea what she was going to say. Spike's leather-clad arm slid round her shoulders, and he snugged her up against his lithely-muscled torso (when had she crossed the seat?) as if they'd been machined for one another, interlocking Buffy n' Spike action figures, stakes sold separately. The discordant twinging of her Slayer senses mellowed into _Mmmmmmm, Spike_, the tense knot between her shoulder blades eased up, and she felt a faint hope that she could engage Faith in civil conversation for five minutes before resorting to communication via blunt instrument. _Next on Oprah: Vampire Valium--Moral Support or Co-Dependant Wackiness? You Decide!_

But whichever it was, it worked, and if the fact that Spike slacked off on baiting Angel for the remainder of the trip meant anything, at least she wasn't the only one jonesing for a PDA fix.

There was covered parking, or close enough for government work; no one caught fire on the way to the door. There was an hour-long delay while they signed in, were searched, and cooled their collective heels waiting for a private booth to open up. There were a dozen other people in the waiting room with them, including a few fretful children, so discussing what they'd come for was problematic. Every now and then a man with a clipboard popped out of a door, called out a name, and disappeared, apparently terrified of seeing his own shadow and causing six more weeks of incarceration. The lucky winner would get up, collect their children or CARE packages of cigarettes and toiletries, and file out through the same door.

Buffy perched on the edge of the bench, one hand fiddling with the cool silver weight of the ring on the chain around her neck. Spike was sliding progressively lower on his tailbone beside her, eyes closed, one hand thrust into his belt and his booted feet obstructing as much of the aisle in front of him as he could manage. Angel occupied the chair opposite, watching the two of them with folded arms and a melancholy frown.

A pair of guards marched by in the hall outside, escorting a sullen woman with short-cropped hair and an expression of dull resignation. Buffy watched them disappear down the corridor, feeling twitchy. The atmosphere was oppressive--the guards, the stark institutional rooms, the impersonal humiliation of the routine. _ Hello, prison! Duh!_ She'd wanted Faith here. Scratch that, she'd wanted Faith beaten to a bloody pulp, suffering every second of misery she'd put Buffy through tenfold, but prison was the right thing to do, so she'd settled. Or so she'd thought. Stalag 17 this wasn't, but...Buffy tilted her head in Spike's direction and whispered, "So if you did something awful, which punishment would you pick--get beaten up, or do ten years?"

"What d'y'mean, if?" Spike opened one eye. "Getting off scott free's not an option, then? Beating. Lock me up and I'd go starkers inside a week."

"Total agreement. I mean, it hurts, but then it's _over_. Does that say something about us?"

"We're not just masochists, we're impatient masochists?"

"I am strangely not comforted."

Mr. Clipboard did the human cuckoo-clock routine again. "Summers?"

Buffy got to her feet, all the knots in her stomach untying at once, releasing a flock of mutant killer butterflies. Angel looked up. "You want me to go in with you?" Buffy nodded, and he rose silently to his feet. Spike didn't say anything, but he didn't have to; that he'd watch her back was a given. Her hand found his and hung on tightly as the three of them followed their guide out the door and into the large hall where the line of glass-divided booths stretched from one end to the other.

Buffy watched as they brought Faith into the cubicle, two big guards with crew-cuts and hands the size of Easter hams. Buffy wondered idly how long it would take Faith to turn them into cold cuts if the mood took her, and if Faith would enjoy doing it. Faith of the long dark tresses and heavy-lidded eyes, the face of a street-worn Madonna and the mouth of a Long Island dockworker, stood there while the guards uncuffed her hands, trying for nonchalant and mostly succeeding. Buffy pulled out the chair on her side of the barrier--it was the same kind of chair they'd had in her elementary school, bright blue plastic seat and all--and sat down. On her side of the glass Faith did the same. Slayers, dark and light. Worlds apart. Or maybe, these days, not so much.

As the guards left them, Faith ran the palms of her hands down the tails of her blue denim prison shirt, licked her lips. Nervous. Faith. Dark eyes flicked past Buffy's shoulder to the two vampires in the background, doing their own little yin-yang thing--Angel loomed, Spike lounged. She looked to Angel first, seeking reassurance, then to Spike, full of questions. "So. B. You building a harem, or what?" She pressed her hand to the bridge of her nose, grimacing. "That was so not the first thing I planned on saying."

"You had a first thing planned? One up on me." Oh, this was going well. Maybe she should just launch herself at the glass screaming now and avoid the rush. Spike's hand drifted over to rest on her shoulder, cool and solid, an anchor to a world where she wasn't Psycho-Bitca Buffy. Pause, rewind.

Angel stirred. "Faith, this is Spike. He's..." He stopped, struggled with it for awhile, and shrugged."Present, for reasons beyond me."

Spike smirked and gave Faith a little wave. "We've met."

Faith peered out at him from between her fingers. "Figured that out, huh?"

"Yeh." His smirk intensified. "Lost your chance for that confrontation I promised you, though. I'm taken."

"Let's just embrace the weirdness and move on, shall we?" Buffy interrupted. Temper-holding exercise #1: Count the nose-smudges on the barrier between her and Faith. _My, what high-quality plexiglass_. "I think the Council of Watchers is going to contact you soon, if they haven't already. I think they're going to ask for your help and offer to get you out of here. And I--" The words caught in her throat, "I'm asking you to turn them down."

Faith braced one foot against the counter and rocked back in her chair, a frown twisting her brows. "Turn 'em down?"

"With a rousing chorus of 'Look For the Union Label.' We're on strike. I'm trying to get us paid. I know you hate me and I'm not too fond of you, but--"

"Fuck, B., I don't hate you. I--"

"No!" Buffy cut her off with a sharp, one-handed chop. "Don't. Don't tell me you're sorry. There's not enough sorry in the world. Just... do this thing for me, and..." Think about bills. Think about Dawn. Think about Dawn's tuition. "...we're even."

Faith studied her, pinching her lower lip between thumb and forefinger. When she spoke her voice was quiet, serious. "I'm copacetic, B. I owe you. But... not exactly the Council's poster girl for good behavior, here. What makes you think they'll hit me up?"

Buffy shrugged. "Because with me out of the picture--not patrolling, not making with the world saveage--you're the only game in town. And the Slayer line's through you, now. If the Council wants a Slayer, they need you. Or they need you dead."

"Think they'd croak me?" Faith's tone held mild curiosity, no more. "Well, hell, even if I wanted out of this pit ahead of schedule I wouldn't kiss their mildewed British asses to do it. I didn't get tried as an adult for nothin'. And if they want me dead..." She licked her lips again, and this time it wasn't a nervous gesture at all. "I could use a workout. What?"

"Nothing. You just... remind me of someone all of a sudden. There's one more thing."

Buffy glanced over her shoulder, catching Spike's eye. His scarred brow lifted fractionally; she nodded just as fractionally, and Spike heaved himself off the cubicle wall he'd been supporting and shoved his hands in his duster pockets. "Come on, Peaches, we're wanted elsewhere."

Angel looked to Buffy for confirmation--what, hadn't he seen her explain it to Spike? Obviously not onboard the non-verbal Slayer/vampire bandwagon. "I'd like to talk to Faith privately." Angel gave Faith a small encouraging smile and reluctantly followed Spike out of the booth. Buffy took a deep breath and turned back to her erstwhile nemesis. Faith looked a little older, a little more tired--_ don't we all?_\--but solider, somehow, as if the whirlwind of rage and loss within her had spun itself roots. "So, you're looking very... rehabilitated."

"Yeah, I'm rehabilitated as all hell. If I'm a real good girl they'll let me off the Group W bench next year."Faith kicked back in her chair and began winding one of her long dark locks around her index finger. The shadow of her old sly grin flitted across her face. "You look like you're getting laid well and often. I almost didn't recognize you without the pole up your ass. You and Soldier Boy still going at it?"

The mention didn't hurt nearly as much as she thought it would. Of course, Faith wouldn't be up on the latest episodes of _The Many Loves of Buffy Summers_. "Riley and I broke up last year. His unit got... reassigned."

"So who's the lucky--fuckin' A!" Faith dropped her chair back on all fours with a crash and slapped a palm on the counter before her, the shadow-grin metamorphosing into the old lunatic glee. "B.! You vamp-lovin' she-dog, you! It's short, blond, and lickable, isn't it?"

Buffy buried her face in her hands with an embarrassed little wail and looked up, fixing Faith with huge stricken eyes. "Is it that obvious? Am I walking around with 'Spike's Lust-Puppy' stamped on my forehead? "

Faith snickered. "Something like. I never figured you for the kind to take that particular walk on the wild side, but the vibe you two got going is something else. You better watch out, B., or you might start enjoying life."

Despite herself, Buffy smiled."You laugh, but the possibility's a constant threat to my peace of mind these days." _You are not having a conversation with Faith. Stop it, right this minute_. "There is something else I need to tell you about. When Giles talked to the head of the Council about the money sitch, part of the song and dance Travers gave him was a lot of hints about Slayers of a certain age going wonky somehow. For what it's worth."

Faith snorted. "Oh, yeah, I fear that. Been there, done that, got the commemorative margarita glass."

Buffy began playing with the ring again. "So true--I don't know how they'd tell with you. But--to channel Cordelia for a minute--it may be to your advantage that you're kind of a whack-job. I don't trust the Council any farther than I could punt City Hall, but I've got... outside evidence that they may be right." She laced her fingers together on the countertop to still the tremor in them."When we... when you first came to Sunnydale, you got me to touch it. The power. Whatever's inside of us. But then--well, it made you crazy, giving in to it. Can't be of the good."

"I was fucked up long before I got Called, B." Faith shrugged. "Can't blame everything on the Slayer mojo."

"Yeah, well, after that I thought I could put slaying in a neat little box. Just what I do, not what I am. Riley thought that was the way to go, too. Then two years ago we had to perform a spell to tap the power of the First Slayer to defeat the baddie of the month. Whatever it was we touched, it was old, and it was strong, and it had a really nasty temper and a permanent bad hair day. I channeled it. Ever since then, I've been..." She clasped her hands together, hard enough to leave white marks on the skin. "I don't want to say different. This stuff was always there. That's what's scary about it. It just keeps coming closer and closer to the surface." _Leaving Riley asleep in their bed, oblivious, while she roamed unsatisfied through the night, hunting, searching, for-_\- "When I slay--"Deep, trembling breath of confession; what she could not admit to Spike, even though he already knew the truth of it, what she feared to admit to Giles, what she had barely begun to admit to herself--she could admit to Faith, who was also a Slayer, who had swum these same dark currents, navigated the same riptides of the soul. "I enjoy it."

For once Faith's face was unreadable. "I told you a long time ago, if you don't you're in the wrong line of business."

Spike's voice, sandpaper and honey, over the rush and whine of traffic: _Christ, love, I **hope **you enjoy it!_ But Spike was a vampire, her opposite, her _prey_ , just as she was his, and she couldn't quite trust--not yet--that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. "Since I got back..." She stopped, her throat aching. "Since I got back, we go out patrolling, Spike and I--no. We _hunt_. We find vampires and demons and things that go bump in the night, and when we fight--it's like we're this, this force, this--the rush is incredible. I _love_ it. And since we--I feel him, all the time. I can't keep my hands off him.We come back to his crypt or my house and pig out on everything in sight or make love for hours. Or both. I'm sleeping better than I have in years. I think I've gained three pounds. I. Feel. Fantastic.

"And it's wrong," she finished quietly. "I know it's wrong. I know there's a chance that it the chip ever breaks down Spike's not going to be able to control himself. He's trying, and I'll help him any way I can. But he's a vampire, a demon, and he... if Spike falls off the wagon, people die. I shouldn't be taking the risk."

Faith frowned. "So you're, what, all guilty over this thing with Spike? And you think that's the wonkiness Travers was jawing about?"

Buffy shook her head. "No. The wonkiness is that I _am_ taking the risk. I _want_ to take the risk. Angel told me I shouldn't need a monster like Spike to make me feel whole, but... I think I do. I think maybe...these things I'm feeling... I'm kind of a monster too. There's something wrong with me, or I wouldn't--I wouldn't be this happy. And I like it. If I'm wrong I want to stay that way." She met Faith's eyes, her own level and sad. "I love him. And someday, I may have to kill him.I'm afraid that if I--if I get more wrong, I won't be able to do it--not fast enough. I might even... someone might have to go through me to do it. You're probably the only one who could do it. That's why I'm telling you this."

For a long minute Faith sat there, staring at Buffy with bemused sloe-dark eyes. Then she began to laugh, and in another breath she was doubled over, clutching her stomach with both hands and howling with mirth. Buffy stared at her, eyes narrowed and lips pressed even narrower, unable to decide if Faith's Cheez Whiz had slipped completely off her cracker or if she were just really, really annoying. "I'm so glad my slow descent into moral quicksand is amusing."

"Oh, B.," Faith gasped, sitting up and wiping her eyes. "I'm sorry, but you're so damned _funny_, sitting there with your trembly lip and your Brave Little Toaster face on! You think you're goin' over to the dark side, and your first move as a rogue Slayer is setting yourself up to get spanked if you get too naughty! Buffy Summers, the world's most goody-two-shoes villain!"

"It sounded a lot more dramatic the way I put it," Buffy muttered. She sucked in her lower lip. _It is **so** not trembly_.

"B., if it makes you feel better, if the day comes you can't keep sweet William in line, I'll do it." Faith chuckled. "I owe him a confrontation. But don't sell yourself short. You're still the top bitch around here, you know? And hey, I'm glad you've got something good goin'." She leaned forward, forearms crossed on the counter. "He is good, I hope?"

The corner of Buffy's mouth twitched. "No. He's not good. Yet. But he's getting better." She got up and started to leave, then halted and came back with a little hip-twitch in her walk. She leaned forward over the counter, resting her weight on her fists and lowering her voice to a throaty, eat-your-heart-out purr. "And the way you're talking about?" She straightened with a smug little grin, and gave Faith the same little finger-wave Spike had earlier. "Don't you wish you knew? See ya, F."


	19. Chapter 19

The outer doors of L'Orangerie were flanked by dwarf orange trees, their small sour fruit just beginning to blush gold with the colder nights. From his vantage point in the front seat of the convertible, Angel could see all the way through the archway and into the courtyard beyond, where a fountain burbled in the center of the flagstone pavement. Evening deepened and merged with the night as he waited, and the lights in the courtyard came on, glimmering white and gold in the indigo shadows. The scent of citrus and damp stone contested with the fumes from the unending stampede of cars rushing by on La Cienega Avenue, but the clash of odors didn't bother him; he hadn't inhaled for fifteen minutes.

It had once been his favorite part of the hunt, this--stalking his victim, learning their ways, their fears, their weaknesses, building from the timber of their own hearts the scaffold upon which he would hang them. Not for Angelus the quick kill; each death was unique and to be savored. He was, in his own way, an artist. He still found pleasure in pursuit, little though he liked to acknowledge the fact.

Men in exquisitely tailored suits and women in silk and pearls drove up, entrusted sleek late-model cars to valets and straggled up the walk, to disappear into the restaurant. Other parties straggled out by ones and twos and fours to reclaim their shining fiberglass chariots. The clothing was different, and the vehicles moved via internal combustion rather than horsepower, but the patterns of fashionable entertainment had changed little over the past two hundred years.

Laughter and fragments of conversation fell upon his ears, slices of other people's lives at once enigmatic and banal. Angel listened. He couldn't help listening. He hadn't tried to eavesdrop on Buffy's conversation with Faith, either, but vampire hearing couldn't help but pick up some of it, even from halfway across an echoing room filled with the yammering of two dozen other women trying to connect to the outside world across an inch-thick barrier of smudged glass. Having heard, he couldn't ignore the implications. If he could get her away from Spike for awhile, or get Spike away from her, he could... he didn't know what, maybe just run a stake through Spike's chest and walk quietly away. But if Buffy were as emotionally dependant upon Spike as she seemed to be, he might be running her through as well. A dilemma.

The players in said dilemma emerged from the restaurant shortly after ten, party of four: Hank Summers, unassuming middle-aged man with greying brown hair and a slight paunch minimized by the cut of his dinner jacket; Linda Gutierrez, a Hispanic woman young and pretty enough to be a trophy girlfriend, though the forceful look in her eyes cast doubt on that notion; Buffy Summers, vampire slayer and sometime love of his life, ethereal in cream and rose, with her tawny-gold hair caught up and bound about the top of her head with a gold fillet; and Spike, former minion, former nemesis, long-time annoyance, lean, pale and elegant in a dark suit and a necktie only true love could have coerced him into. Linda was grilling Spike, who looked a trifle harried.

"...Tuesday," Spike said, "but it was the bagged stuff from Willie's. The blood bank can chuck it when it expires or sell it on the black market; who am I to deny some poor overworked intern a little extra income?"

"Uh huh." Linda was obviously still skeptical. "And the last time you bit someone?"

"Er... Halloween. But there were extenuating circumstances! Tell her, Buffy!"

Buffy was right at his side, her fingers curled possessively around the crook of Spike's arm, laughing at his discomfiture in the face of Linda's rapid-fire questions, her upturned face illumined by a brilliant smile, tinged now with wicked humor. "If there hadn't been, he'd be Mr. Big Pile of Dust about now."

It struck Angel that he hadn't seen that smile in a very long time, and for a moment his resolve wavered. Only for a moment; he had not survived this long on sentiment. He reached across the front seat and picked up the stake, tucking it into the sleeve of his coat. His quarry was in sight; he need only cut him from the rest of the herd. He opened the car door and slipped out into the too-bright L.A. night, a shadow among shadows.

*****

"...didn't know you spoke French," Hank said, unwillingly impressed.

Spike favored Hank with the thirteenth smirk of the evening. There was an American for you; never mind the bloodsucking creature of the night bits, the astonishing thing is he speaks more than one language! "Enough to get by. You spend fifty-plus years knocking about Europe, you pick up what you hear the most: 'Où est la salles des bains?' 'Mon Dieu! Arrêtez, s'il vous plaît. Ne me tuez pas!' the usual. "

"Show-off," Buffy said in the tone which meant she was incredibly pleased with him. She gave his arm a quick squeeze, her eyes brighter than the lights inside, and who needed a heartbeat when you had a girl like this looking at you like that? Her lower lip slipped out in a mock-pout. "I could have handled it. I took two semesters of French in high school."

He dipped his head to nuzzle her ear. "Love, you ordered a shoe."

Buffy looked sidelong up at him through lowered lashes, daring him to tease the pout into another smile. "So maybe I wanted a shoe. You can never have too many shoes."

Spike nodded, excessively sober, and turned on his heel, spinning her around with him. "Right then, back we go, and you can correct my pronunciation to the waiter--"

Buffy gave a little shriek of laughter as the valet drove up with Hank's Lexus, and wrestled Spike back to the curb. "Don't you dare!" Abandoning him for the moment, she grabbed her father in an impulsive, rib-cracking hug and kissed him on the cheek. "Dad, thank you! I think this is the first real night out I've had in a year, and it's been wonderful." Spike made a mental note that if what amounted to a double date with her father was producing this kind of reaction, a romantic dinner for two would probably induce Buffy-meltdown. Buffy did a little pirouette on the sidewalk, while Hank surreptitiously felt his sides to see if anything had snapped. "I just wish it didn't have to end--I feel like dancing till dawn, or--"

"Why not, then?" Spike caught her hand, pulled her back into the circle of his arm, and dipped her tango-fashion. "Got enough for a cab, don't we? We can find some speakeasy with a cover charge in the single digits and let the old folks toddle on home--"

Buffy giggled. "Coming from the only person here who's celebrated a centennial, and uses the term speakeasy with a straight face..." She threw her father a hopeful upside-down look. "It won't bother you if we get in late? I know you said you had to go in to work this weekend..."

Spike suppressed a laugh at the guilt which creased Hank Summers's brow. If Buffy'd been a less scrupulous person she could have parlayed that look into a weekend at the Hilton at the least. As it was, Hank handed the valet his tip, hesitated, extracted his Visa card from his wallet and handed it to Buffy. "Here, sweetie. Have fun. Just don't make me come bail you out, hmm?"

"Ooh, platinum. My favorite color." She reached up and ruffled Spike's hair. It was barely possible, Spike thought, that he and Summers pere had one thing in common--her father seemed to be just as addicted to that glowing smile of hers as he was, looking pleased as hell when Buffy bestowed another hug which threatened the integrity of his internal organs. "Dad, you're tops. The concierge had a phone--I'll go call us a cab." She dashed back towards the restaurant door in a flurry of--well, Buffy would have been able to describe the dress in exacting technical detail, but Spike settled for 'sheer floaty stuff.' Pity they were going to have to return it in the morning; she looked ravishing in the low-cut, cream-colored bodice which left exactly enough to the imagination...

"Don't let her get into trouble," Hank said, getting into his car.

Spike tore himself away from his diverting speculation on just how athletic Buffy could get in that dress before coming out of it and grinned. "Not a matter of 'let,' mate." He watched the Lexus pull away from the curb and took a deep breath for the hell of it, reveling in the scent of smog and oranges, and gave himself up to the luxury of dithering over whether or not he'd have a smoke.

Buffy's happiness was contagious, but this trip hadn't solved anything, not really--it might take weeks, or months, before the Council buckled under to Buffy's demands, if they ever did. Till then, she was still in a precarious position financially, and in her custody of Dawn. The thought of her having to take some scut-work job to make ends meet made him itch to crack a few Watcher heads. She wouldn't take money from him, for fear of where he might have obtained it. Spike rocked back on his heels and shoved his hands in his pockets, heedless of what he was doing to the cut of his suit. Buffy could be unreasonably suspicious at times; just because he'd happened to mention that between the two of them they were probably strong enough to rip an ATM machine out of the wall and break it open didn't mean he was planning on doing it. Not any time soon, anyway.

He needed very little for himself; scavenging, gambling, and the occasional petty theft kept him in blood and beers very nicely, with just enough uncertainty to make life interesting. He could have gotten a job, even in Sunnydale, where the underworld was a tiny, parochial thing compared to Los Angeles's thriving demon community. There were several higher-up demons in town who used vampires for muscle, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was kicking ass. Until recently he'd scorned the idea--he was no one's lackey, and though he'd shed as many of the trappings of his living days as he could, there remained a stubborn core of William-beliefs so deeply ingrained as to be instinct: one opened doors for a lady, one paid one's gaming debts even if one had to knock over a convenience store to do so, and a gentleman didn't sully his hands with trade.

Still, he wasn't a gentleman any longer by any stretch of the imagination, and Buffy was his girl now. That made him at least partly responsible for her welfare, not to mention Dawn's. Buffy would most certainly not see it that way, but... perhaps some sullying was in order. Spike felt a curious internal warmth that had nothing to do with body temperature--it had been a long time since anyone had depended on him for anything. _ Pride? Haven't had that in stock since the crash of '98, but root around in the cellar, mate, p'raps there's a crate left in a corner somewhere._

His current reputation was such that some prospective employers might even find it an advantage; owning the loyalty of the vampire who'd done in Slayers and his own kind alike would be a coup in some circles. On the other hand, his inability to attack humans was a distinct liability. More to the point, he'd never been good at taking orders from anyone he wasn't in love with, and none of Sunnydale's demon bigwigs were all that appealing. Scratch that idea, save as a desperation ploy. What other possibilities were there? Besides his talents in the ass-kicking line, he spoke a dozen-odd languages, both human and demon, could identify hundreds of demon species on sight, had a working command of black magic combined with an intense distrust of same, possessed an eclectic knowledge of nineteenth and twentieth century human literature, wrote poetry badly, and had a certain knack for interior decorating on a non-existent budget--not exactly a resume calculated to bring in a six-figure salary in a small college town, even for someone who wasn't a legally dead illegal alien.

The rasping snarl, pitched too low for human ears, interrupted his musings, and Spike perked up immediately. Whatever it was sounded large and brassed off, exactly what he needed to banish unprofitable thoughts about profits. Buffy would be out soon. Perhaps he should wait...

_Right. _ He might be whipped and happy to be so, but he wasn't _ that_ whipped. _ Whatever it is, I can kill the bugger and be back in two ticks. Piece of cake._

*****

It looked too simple. Summers and his girlfriend took off, and then Buffy ran back into the restaurant. The patness of it all made Angel suspect a setup, but there was no way any of them could have known he'd be here tonight; his decision to come had been wholly on the spur of the moment. Sometimes the simple explanation was the correct one, and luck was working in his favor.

Spike stood on the curb, rocking back and forth very slightly from heel to toe and gazing out at traffic with a contemplative expression. Angel's slow and purposeful stalk had brought him within fifty feet of his one-time protege when he heard the growl. Spike snapped to attention like a warhorse hearing a distant trumpet-charge, and a glittering, vicious smile spread across his face. He looked over his shoulder at the courtyard, then turned and strode away across the close-cropped lawn towards the side of the building, breaking into an eager trot at the sound of another growl. Angel increased his own pace to keep up. Spike pulled his suit jacket off as he ran, hopped a low stucco wall and disappeared behind a stand of topiary trees. A third growl segued into a full-throated roar, competing with the thump and rattle of the restaurant's heat pump. The roar was followed by the crackle of breaking branches and Spike came sailing back through the foliage, leaving a ragged hole in the center of the carefully-manicured privet hedge. He hit the grass rolling, somersaulted to his feet and shook himself violently, shedding leaves and twigs in all directions. He threw back his head with a wolf-howl, whooped "Come and get it, baby!" and dove back through the hedge.

Angel called down silent imprecations on whatever demon had wandered up out of the sewers to complicate his plans, and ducked around the hedge. Spike's opponent wasn't a species Angel recognized; it stood at least eight feet tall and must have measured as much across. Its haystack of a body was covered with thick slatey-blue fur and an assortment of shiny, multi-faceted black hemispheres in varying sizes radiating out in an irregular whorl from the tooth-filled maw in the thing's upper surface. Whether they were eyes, tympanic membranes, or something else entirely was impossible to say. It supported its bulk on three elephantine limbs and lashed out at Spike with another three long, whiplike tentacles, each equipped with a set of claws like ebony scimitars. Spike ducked as the nearest tentacle sliced through the air over his head, close enough to shave off the tip of a bone-white curl or two, and came up again inside the thing's reach.

Angel's first thought was that Spike had just gone insane; there was no way he could fight this thing effectively without a weapon. It was too large to wrestle, punching and kicking would make little impression on that enormous bulk, and its fur looked too thick for a vampire's fangs to penetrate even had Spike been in game face. A second later the method in Spike's madness became clear as his fist hammered into one of the shiny black organs, smashing it to glistening jelly. The demon's roaring escalated and Spike darted back as it reared up on two legs and tried to trample him with the third.

Spike continued his lethal dance, ducking under or leaping over the whirling tentacles, flitting forward to pulp another eyespot whenever an opening presented itself. His arms were covered with translucent red-black goo to the elbow, and blood was running into one eye from a cut on his forehead where he'd been a hair too slow on a dodge. His eyes were aflame with kill-lust, his breath came in short harsh explosions through bared teeth, and there was a fine sheen of sweat on his face--physical reactions born of emotion, not exertion; a vampire's body had no need to regulate its temperature.

Angel wavered on the fringes of the fight, debating whether or not to join in. If he remained aloof there was a good chance his problem would be solved for him, but then he'd have to dispose of this thing by himself, and he'd left his thrice-cursed cell phone in the car so calling for backup wasn't an easy matter. The matter was taken out of his hands forthwith; Spike zigged when he should have zagged, and one of the creature's tentacles coiled around Spike's chest, pinning his arms and lifting him bodily off the ground. The concentric rings of serrated teeth in the demon's maw gnashed like an animate paper shredder as the tentacle propelled Spike towards the opening. With a curse Angel leaped forward, aiming a roundhouse kick at the thing's near leg. At the same time Spike vamped out, bent his head and sank his fangs into the wrinkled blue skin of the tentacle holding him, ripping out a sizeable hunk of ichor-dripping flesh.

The creature's roar took on train-whistle urgency. The tentacle holding Spike spasmed and flung the vampire into the side of the building. Spike landed hard on one shoulder and plummeted to the ground, gagging on demon blood. Angel dropped into a crouch, wrapped his arms around the leg he'd kicked, and heaved up and out. With a basso wail the thing swayed like a redwood about to topple, then tipped slowly and majestically over onto its side and lay there, waving its tentacles and kicking the air. The tentacle Spike had bitten twitched and shuddered, spattering purple blood across the grass.

Spike got to his feet, ran a hand through his disordered hair, and spat out a mouthful of purple goo. "Like sodding peppermint whale oil, that is. If other demons didn't taste so disgusting my unlife would be a lot easier. " He dusted off the knees of his trousers, keeping an appraising eye on Angel. "Fancy meeting you here. Wondered if you were going to join in or stand there with your mouth hanging open in appreciation of my prowess." He rotated his shoulder experimentally, determined that everything was in working order, and walked over to retrieve his coat, all loose-limbed, predatory grace, as if he hadn't just been tossed into a wall like a discarded rag doll.

_You know what he is._ Demon animating the mind and body of a man a hundred and twenty years dead, inhuman arrogance an imperfect mask for all-too-human fears. "So who exactly are you trying to fool, Spike?"

"Eh?" Spike's dark brows sketched twin interrogation marks. "What're you on about?" He shrugged back into his coat, concealing the worst of the damage grass stains and demon blood had done to his shirt. He began going through the pockets, and finally located his lighter and a sadly abused pack of Marlboros. He extracted a cigarette with care and straightened it out, then held the pack out to Angel. "Fag? Or is that too personal a question?"

Angel waved the pack away with impatience; Spike knew damned well that it was Angelus who smoked. Spike shrugged and lit up, tucked his lighter back into his pocket, and tilted his sleek white-blond head back to exhale a stream of smoke, his face was a razor-cheeked study in quiescent savagery. _ What we were informs what we become_ , Darla had told him, long ago. Were there still echoes in Spike of the diffident, bookish young man Drusilla had carted home to him and Darla, like a cat proudly presenting its owners with a bedraggled and half-dead mouse? Not that it mattered; William was dead, and any echoes of him that remained in Spike were only echoes.

"This." Angel strode over and gestured at the fallen demon. "Fighting things like this when Buffy's not around to watch and give you the Slayer seal of approval. Running around in the middle of the day, having a nutritious breakfast when the only four food groups you really need are O, A, B and AB--" Faster than thought, he whipped the stake out of his coat sleeve and rammed it against Spike's chest. "You'd almost pass for human. But not quite. You've gotten soft, old pal. The Spike I knew would never have let me get within five feet of him."

Spike glanced down at the wooden point making a divot in the lapel of his suit jacket, unflustered. "Yeh, I've gotten into this bad habit of trusting people lately. Give it a rest, Angelus. If you'd meant to stake me or Dru you'd have done it years ago, not pissed around setting her on fire--she told me about that little joke of yours. You're keen on the pre-show, but when it comes to the kickoff you're back in the stands. You'll beat us, burn us, drag us through hell at your heels--but kill us? Never."

"Fancy talk from someone whose last conversation with me was conducted with the business end of a hot poker." Angel held Spike's eyes for a beat, long enough to let Spike grow uneasy about the accuracy of his assessment, and at last let the stake drop. "Why should I, when I can will hurt you a lot more by letting you live? Don't expect me to weep for Drusilla. The crazy bitch deserved it." He might as well have reached in and run a file right along a nerve; hatred boiled up in Spike's eyes, their golden depths going molten. This was too easy. "Careful, Spike. If you keep asking for Angelus, you may get him."

A visible quiver of rage tensed Spike's shoulders, but somewhat to Angel's surprise he held himself back and twitched his coat back into place. "Right, I forgot. You're the good twin."

"I've been trying to figure it out all day," Angel said, ignoring him. It would be satisfying to rip Spike's spine out and tie it in knots, but ultimately pointless. For vampires physical pain was cheap, healed and forgotten in hours or days. No, if he wanted to wound Spike, he knew exactly how to do it. He stepped back a pace or two and studied the younger vampire. "What's in this for you besides the thrill of notching your bedpost?"

Still abnormally calm, Spike leaned back against the hedge and sucked on his cigarette. "Don't think I much care for your tone when speaking of my girl."

"Your girl." Angel's voice took on a gunmetal chill. "Tell me something, Spike. Do you believe your own line?"

"What d'you mean by that?"

"Simple interrogative sentence. Do you really believe you can give up being evil?"

Spike blew a smoke ring. "Give up the killing? Give up the rush of seeing things go smash? Give up the joy--" He kicked in another of the fallen demon's eyes with a black glee that suggested he would far rather be connecting the toe of his boot with Angel's face--"of hurting something? No." His nostrils flared. "But I can bloody well be selective about who I kill, and when. Traitor's not exactly a noble occupation, but you're in it right along with me, so glass houses, eh?"

If there was one thing Spike was not, it was a plausible liar, and his voice was edgy now with anger and sincerity. Maybe he had convinced himself, as well as Buffy, that he had a prayer of resisting his own nature for more than a token few weeks... no, months now, almost a year. An eyeblink to someone who'd seen two and a half centuries roll by, hell, an eyeblink to Spike, who was half his age. "I'm glad you realize that much," Angel said, lacing his hands together behind his back and pacing in a slow circle around Spike and the heap of quivering blue fur. "That you can't change what you are. Does Buffy, though--does she really?"

A muscle in Spike's jaw jumped. "You'd have to ask Buffy that."

"'Cause I'm not sure she really gets it," Angel continued. Spike turned uneasily in place, trying to keep him in sight. "The urges. You know. Not just for blood. For destruction. For a good slaughter. The sweetness of inflicting pain, the delicious scent of fear--not just any fear, either. Human fear. Human pain. That's our natural prey, Spike. Hard to imagine you've given it up entirely."

"'Our'?" Spike asked, his eyes hooded.

"You think I don't still feel it?" Even with a soul, even with the twin goads of guilt and remorse constantly pricking him, he'd given in to those urges more than once; he still woke sometimes from dreams of Kate's rich living blood gushing into his mouth, or the artistic satisfaction of closing the doors on the crowd from Wolfram &amp; Hart. Remorse was stronger than the satisfaction, but Spike knew none, and Spike had never possessed his self-control; the chip only provided him with an illusion of it.

Spike snorted, folding his arms across his chest. "Didn't think you'd admit it if you did. What's all this in service of? I've got a lady waiting."

"Harmony showed up in L.A. last spring."

"My condolences."

"Decided she was going to be a good guy."

"Really?" Spike looked intrigued for a second. "Did the bint make a go of it, or did she work the Kendall magic once again?"

"What do you think, Spike? She betrayed us to a vampire cult within twenty-four hours. So I'm just not all that convinced that your little turn-around is for real. I'll grant you've beaten her record. I'll even grant you love Buffy, the same sick way you loved Drusilla, and that makes it bearable being the neutered little lapdog you are today. But I know you, Spike. You're a monster, and furthermore, you love being a monster. You don't regret a single life you've taken, the first thought in your head when you see a human being walk into a room is 'Mmm, tasty!' and if that chip came out tomorrow--"

Spike's lips peeled back in a wolfish grin over sharp white fangs, and a harsh bark of laughter escaped him. "I'd what? Enlighten me, Angelus. What'm I going to do?"

"Right--you've changed. Got a quote for you: 'Not us! Not demons!' Name that tune, Spike."

"A prize fuckwit of my acquaintance." Between one absent breath and the next Spike was nose to nose with Angel, or as close to it as he could get given the difference in their heights. "You tell me something, Angelus! You _had_ her! Had her in your arms, in your bed, all warm and alive--you tasted the closest thing to heaven our kind will ever know! How the bloody hell could you get up the morning after and rip her heart out? She loved you! She would have loved you even without your precious sodding soul if you'd let her, and you threw it all away! And later--you can't shag her lest you experience perfect happiness and lose that inefficiently attached soul again, and what d'you do? Turn the world upside down to find someone who could diddle with the curse? No, not our Angel! He scarpers off to the big city and starts a detective agency. Bloody brilliant!"

Angel grabbed him by the lapels and hauled him up level; Spike didn't fight it, just sneered into his thundercloud frown. "Do you think I had a _choice_ ?" Angel snarled. "Do you think _ I_ wanted to hurt her?"

"In a word, yes!" Spike snarled back. "What's your sodding soul got to do with it? You love her or you don't, Peaches! You want an explanation? Here it is: Buffy's with me because you let her go, you bloody great git!"

Angel dropped Spike in one motion and in the next his fist connected with the younger vampire's jaw hard enough to slam him back into the wall of blue fur behind them. "I let her go because it was the right thing to do! Something you're incapable of understanding."

Spike pulled himself upright on one of the thing's tentacles, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. It left a gory smear of mingled red and purple across his sleeve. "What I'm incapable of is leaving her--not unless she gives me the boot herself. I'd fucking well rather walk out into the sun and burn. She makes me feel--balls, why am I telling you this? You know! And you left anyway, because you'd bloody well rather wallow in misery than try to solve the problem!"

"Better to face the misery than delude myself into thinking we had a future," Angel snapped. "And that's all it would be: delusion. Every single thing that made it impossible for Buffy and me goes double for Buffy and you. You're evil. She's not. You're immortal. She's not. You'll burn in the sun and she'll wither in the dark. It's not meant to be."

Spike's lip curled up to expose one razor-sharp canine and he all but spat at Angel's feet. "Why should I give a toss what's meant to be? I'm not the special pet of the Powers, with a bouquet of prophecies pinned to my manly chest. I can do as I sodding well please with my unlife--not that I wouldn't anyway. What's meant to be is what happens, when it happens, and not a minute sooner."

"What's _ happened,"_ Angel said, emphasizing the word very deliberately, "Is that Buffy died. That's a traumatic experience."

"Yeh, seems to me I remember it being a tad upsetting. Can't recall you being there."

"She told me that when she first came back, you were the only thing that seemed real to her. She figures that's love." Angel's dark eyes raked Spike up and down. "I figure it's instinct. She's a Slayer. Killing your kind is what she was born for. Of course you're going to be the first thing she focuses on." He gave Spike a knife-edged smile. "But you know what? She's waking up now. She's starting to see other things again. I'm betting that when she realizes that there's a whole real, daylight world out there for her--she'll walk out into it. And you won't be able to follow her. What are you going to do then?"

"Ring you up and cry on your shoulder. Here, did you just hunt me down to--half a mo'." Spike cocked his head to one side, ice-blue eyes slitted, an incredulous grin curling across his face. "Bloody hell, I get it--you _want_ me to cock up, don't you? You'd throw a sodding ticker-tape parade if I slipped and took a nibble from the nearest warm body. If I can be a good boy, you can't can keep yourself toasty warm at night with your woolly blankie of moral superiority. _You_ couldn't help breaking her heart--no, that was Angelus. Can't hold the bloody special soul-having Angel responsible for what the soulless monster did! Well, bugger that! I've sussed it out, Peaches--it took almost a year for Buffy to admit I _ could_ love her, and she's still half convinced there's something wrong with _ her_ that you couldn't love her without your bloody soul. If I'd no other reasons I'd play white hat just to spite you, y'pathetic wanker!"

"You know, Spike, I came out here tonight with half a mind to kill you, and--"

Spike's eyes went wide and Angel felt a twinge of irritation; surely he wasn't going to try the old 'There's someone behind you!' trick. A second later he recalled that Spike was the world's worst liar, and spun around. Not someone; some thing.

With a gargantuan shudder the blue-furred monstrosity rolled over, coiled its two uninjured tentacles around the nearest lamp post, and heaved itself upright to the accompaniment of metallic pops and groans. Spike dropped to his knees as a tentacle lashed out and the ropy appendage whipped over his head and wrapped itself around Angel. The creature had learned its lesson; the thing gripped him too low around the waist for him to reach it with his fangs. Spike, crouched on the grass below, looked up at him and laughed, then sprang at the demon, aiming for another eye. Before he reached his target a small lithe shape bearing a long, spear-like object came hurtling down from the roof of the restaurant. It landed squarely on top of the demon's rolling back, astride the gnashing pit of teeth, and thrust downward with the thing in its hands. The demon shrieked in pain.

"Past time you got here, pet!" Spike yelled. "You missed Peaches admitting he's got half a mind!"

"Shut up and hit things, Spike!" The thing she'd rammed into the demon's maw was a push-broom, one of the industrial fiberglass-and-metal models. The demon choked and shook itself, and Spike laughed, pulping another eyespot. Buffy grinned down at him, her now-unbound hair a wild golden halo about her head, her eyes shining green and alight with feral joy. This time his arm went deeper; he hauled out something fibrous and necessary-looking. The demon jerked and staggered, a Brobdignagian marionette with tangled strings. Its rings of teeth pulsed futilely around the head of the broom, unable to spit it out or snap it into pieces small enough to swallow. Buffy hung on to the shaggy blue carpet of fur as it spun ponderously in place and started its second topple of the night. Angel struggled wildly in the grip of the creature's tentacle, and horror chased excitement from Buffy's face as she realized it was going to land right on top of him. She yanked on a double handful of fur in a hopeless attempt to steer the creature's bulk sideways.

Something slammed into him from the side just before he hit the ground, stretching the tentacle out to its fullest extent so that as the black-speckled blue hulk descended, it crashed to earth several inches short of Angel's body. The tentacle uncoiled on impact, and Angel rolled head over heels and fetched up against the foot of the privet hedge. The thing which had slammed into him lay draped across his shoulders for a second, then sat up and shook itself. Spike. Angel's eyes narrowed. "What the hell did you do that for?"

Spike began picking privet leaves and clumps of mangled rye grass off his jacket. "Oh, there's gratitude for you." He cocked a sardonic eyebrow at his grandsire. "Because I love her more than I hate you."

Buffy let go of the demon's fur, dropped to the ground and ran over to them, skidding to a halt on her knees. "Are you all right?" Her words made no distinctions, but it was Spike's shoulders her arms encircled. Her hands traveled over his face and body, checking for damage. Buffy cradled his head on her shoulder, her face buried in the sticky tangle of his hair, and Spike nuzzled her ear with a resonant growl.

"Never better, love." His eyes shimmered from gold to blue at her touch, and his brow ridges receded--no shame there at her touching his demon face; more as if he were slipping into a more comfortable set of clothes. "You?"

"Fine. Great. Wonderful. Mmmm..." Angel heard her breath catch and resume and her heart trip faster than her recent exertions could justify. Her lashes swept a fringe of dark silk across her flushed cheeks as grey-in-this-light eyes darted for a moment in his direction; had he not been there, Angel was convinced, the two of them would be tearing each other's clothes off and having at it on the blue-furred hulk at this moment. He had a queasy sense of deja vu on multiple levels: _Spike making savage love to Drusilla, couched upon a heap of exsanguinated corpses. Buffy tearing across the dance floor of the Bronze to leap on him, giddy with her own strength and sensuality, heedless of the danger of unleashing it on _him_...or perhaps welcoming that danger. _

He'd seen something close to the core of her being that night, and again on the night when he'd given her those scars on her neck, something deep-rooted and frighteningly strong. Something Faith's fall from grace had frightened her into keeping under rigid control ever since. Now, as she nestled in Spike's arms, he could sense that the bonds she'd placed on herself were loosening and fraying. Spike might not have prompted her dangerous intoxication with the darker side of her nature, but it was obvious that his presence encouraged it.

He wasn't in love with her any longer, nor she with him, but he loved her still, if only for the sake of what she'd done in dragging him as far out of the darkness as it was possible for him to come. He couldn't allow Buffy to fall into the abyss she'd rescued him from.

Unwitting of his realization, Buffy drew back and took in the condition of Spike's clothes with dismay. "I think I speak for both of us when I say thank God for Nordstrom's generous return policy." She jerked a thumb at the demon. "What is that thing?"

"Rudnark demon." Spike got to his feet and gave Buffy a hand up. "Not very bright, but they take a lot of killing. Teach me to go anywhere without an axe again." The Rudnark made a violent choking noise, something like the dying wheeze of a fork-clogged garbage disposal, and gave a final shudder.

Buffy gave it a kick and yanked the broom free. "On the other hand, maybe we've just been underestimating the lethal possibilities of janitorial supplies for all these years." She turned to Angel and took his hand. "We're lucky you happened to be here..." Suspicion clouded her eyes. "You did just happen to be here, didn't you?"

Angel looked at Spike, who shrugged infinitesimally: _Your move_. Spike had saved him from a painful convalescence at least, though he'd done so only for Buffy's sake, and keeping Buffy's trust at this point was paramount. "Cordelia had a vision." True; Cordelia had had lots of visions.

"What you might call a fortuitous coincidence," Spike said, a wicked gleam in his eyes.

"Well, it's a good whatever he said." She squeezed Angel's hands and smiled up at him; a century of sunrise encompassed in a single human face--she'd never looked less like someone with a death wish. "Thank you. You know--I was terrified of seeing you. Terrified of telling you about... everything. But you've been--wonderful." She looked down at herself and wrinkled her nose. "The disco fever has definitely broken. Maybe we should just go find a hotel with dry-cleaning and room service and check in for the night. We can take a cab back to Dad's apartment before sunrise, sleep in, and head back to Sunnydale this evening."

Spike wrapped his arms around her from behind and nipped at her ear. "Mmm, I love a woman who takes charge. Lead the way, love."

"Thanks again!" Buffy called as they started off towards the waiting cab. "Say hello to Cordelia!"

Angel stood with hand in pockets and a deeply unhappy expression as the two of them walked off arm in arm, covered in purple ichor and palpably eager to be alone with each other. He had more sense than to ever admit to Cordelia that he'd been within twenty miles of Buffy Summers tonight. He felt a sick twist in the pit of his stomach.

He was going to have to call Giles. The Watcher hated him quite as much as Spike did, and for far better reason; if his passion was quieter, it was no less potentially deadly. But there was no help for it, given Buffy's disturbing behavior. Angel drew a pained sigh and headed back towards his car, and that thrice-cursed cell phone.

*****

Candles, black. A whole bank of them, a Milky Way's worth of miniature stars. The circle inscribed in red ochre and sulfur, sigils drawn at each cardinal point with blue chalk, because you couldn't get powdered lapis on such short notice and Anya would have noticed something funny if she'd special-ordered it. Real frankincense, a fine powder scattered across the glowing coals in the brazier. It smouldered and melted around the edges as its languorous perfume rose into the still air of the cavern. Crow's feather to the left, an ebony slash against the rock. Cock's feather to the right, glowing tawny red in the candlelight. In the center of the circle, the knife. Silver, hand-long blade, triangular--a knife designed for the penetrating wound, for drawing blood.

Of course, there would be blood.

Willow smoothed the crumpled, ink-stained pages of the grimoire flat once more, tongue-tip wetting her lips. She'd copied as much as she could of the text and pored over its translation for the last several nights, even tried a small spell to leech the ink-stain out of the ancient paper, but there were still large segments of commentary she couldn't read, and the exact purpose of the spell remained obscure. The blue chalk worried her, but Buffy would be coming back to Sunnydale tonight, and tomorrow--tomorrow she'd have to have her miracle ready. She'd compensated by using the frankincense instead of the combination of stoat's musk and pine resin the spell called for--frankincense was expensive, but she had no idea where she was supposed to find a stoat. She'd taken other precautions, too: she'd drawn another, larger circle in corn meal and turquoise chips around the circumference of the cavern and called on Raven and Corn Mother and all the powers of an entirely different and antithetical tradition to confine any energies which might escape the inner circle.

She knelt in the center of the inner circle, sweating palms folded on her lap. Compared to some of the spells she'd done in her life, this one used comparatively little raw power. It was well within her current limits. Probably, if anything went wrong, she could break off the invocation, refuse to harbor the power she was calling and send it packing. Probably. There was no kidding herself that this wasn't dangerous and stupid, but--

Visions of a wretched landfill encampment she'd never seen with her own eyes flashed through her brain, phantom shapes wracked with misery and fear that she could alleviate--_if only_. Buffy's face, her eyes full of disappointment: _I thought I could depend on you, Will._ Tara's earnest voice, full of pity: _I thought you were someone special._ Other faces, other memories: _Moloch, advancing on her with mechanical deliberation; Mayor Wilkins, cheerily threatening her with death; Spike, drunk and vicious and about to slice her face open; Verruca, laughing at her weakness; the scarecrow figure of Daniel Tanner, tearing her mind free of its moorings..._

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, breathing deeply to calm her racing heart. She raised her arms, palms outspread, and began. Willow picked up the cock's feather, and flung it onto the coals. The stench of burning feathers joined the heavy odor of the incense.

> Herald of the Dawn, guardian of the gates of ivory,  
> Let that which I summon enter!

She could feel the currents of power stirring, rising within her. She picked up the crow's feather and tossed it after its mate.  


> Herald of the Dusk, guardian of the gates of horn,  
> Do not bar the way, but hold it open! 

Willow fumbled for the hilt of the knife; the silver was chill against her skin, an interstellar cold. Willow scrunched her eyes shut, gritted her teeth, and plunged the knife into her palm, the point slicing through skin, stabbing through muscle and tendon, sliding between the metacarpal bones to emerge from the back of her hand. "Thus do I grasp the door into the Great Abyss!" she screamed, yanking the knife free. Agony lanced through her, pain too great to encompass shooting all the way up into her shoulder and coiling around her spinal cord. "Thus do I open the door!" Tears blinded her; blood flowed from the double wound in scarlet rivulets, dripping onto the coals and hissing like a nest of snakes. "Thus do I consecrate the threshold!"

Willow slapped her bleeding left palm down on the brazier. The red and black of the coals seared itself onto the back of her eyelids, and there was noplace she could escape. Fire and ice, meeting, melding, becoming one pain impossible in its scope and perfection. She could smell her own flesh burning, and a part of her mind flung up memories of summer barbeques and hamburgers broiling on the back yard grill. She almost vomited at the image, but with iron determination she swallowed her own bile and pulled her hand away. "The way is open, the path is clear! Enter in where you have been made welcome, Lord of the Great Dark, make of me the vessel for your power and I shall be thy willing servant!"

A wind sprang up where no wind should have been, and the candle-flames dipped and lay almost flat for a breath, for two--and then they were gone, every flame snuffed out, and the great dark they'd kept at bay rolled in and drowned all. There should have been thunder, there should have been lightning and the howling of wolves. There should have been the wailing of damned souls as the Hellmouth gaped wide. But the wind was gone as quickly as it had come, and there was only the deep silence of the caves, made deeper by the slow insistent drip, drip, drip of water in the far distance, in some jet-black fastness where the earth yet labored to bring forth a garden of stone, building its cold limestone blossoms petal by petal over the millennia. Willow knelt alone in the dark, cradling her throbbing hand in her lap and rocking back and forth in pain. Her sobs made pitiful little dents in the silence. Out of the darkness a greater dark coalesced, black as night, black as ice in the deeps of midwinter, an absence of light so intense that it froze the eyes no less than too great a concentration of light could burn. Vast it rose above her, stretching itself from floor to roof-beam, from wall to wall, and perceiving her huddled there stooped like a falcon upon a dove.

** _Woman, why are you weeping?_ **

There was nothing else she could say. "It hurts. It hurrrts!"

** _Then bid it stop._ **

Too dazed to do anything but obey, Willow mumbled, "Wounds be healed, pains be eased."

The pain stopped. And there was no joy in the universe so great as that moment, when the mind still comprehended the full extent of the pain and realized it was no longer there. It was the feeling you got when the Midol kicked in, except a million times better.

Willow crouched on the bare stone floor, holding her uninjured hand. "Fiat lux," she whispered. A ball of golden light sprang into being over her head, shining down on the half-melted ranks of candles, the sullenly smoking brazier, the bloodstained knife. She looked down at her palm; beneath the film of drying blood, the skin there was pink and smooth and perfect, save for a thin silver scar running through the center, bisecting the lines of head and heart and life. Turning her hand over revealed a matching scar on the back, from knuckles to wrist. She flexed her fingers, probing inwardly for the scraped-dry feeling. It wasn't there.

She scrambled to her feet, looking around. There was her book bag and her trusty blue nylon duffle. She pointed at the brazier. "Cool!" She bent over and touched the rim with tentative fingers; the metal held no trace of heat. She picked it up, knocked the half-burnt coals out, and straightened, cupping it in her hands. "Clean!" Instantly, the metal sparkled in the witchlight.

And she felt fine. Just like her old self. Willow broke into a grin, and a giddy laugh escaped her. She hugged the brazier to her chest and spun around, scuffing the now-powerless sigils beneath the soles of her sandals. "Woo! I did it! Ignite!" The candles sprang back to life. "Volo!" She rose into the air and swooped around the cavern, narrowly missing a stalactite--Disneyland had a new E-ticket ride. "Willow Rosenberg, wicca supreme, rides again!"

The cold black voice brought her up short in mid-swoop. **_As it should be. But there will be time for celebrations later. It is time to meet your new companions._**

One by one, from out the pitch black depths of the tunnels on every side, the eyeless men began emerging.


	20. Chapter 20

There were moments in her life Willow wished she could quarantine, like virus-infected files on her computer. Not get rid of them entirely, because who knew when studying them might be useful. Just cordon them off in little partitions of their own, where she could observe them--preferably via a completely different operating system--without actually running the executable. Moments preserved like specimens in formaldehyde, like Jesse's death, or the tropical fish incident, or her parents' realization she hadn't aced the SATs after all--cross-sections of time under glass, tinted to show off their most interesting features.

It was fifty-fifty whether or not this was going to be one of those moments. She was sitting in a cave a little too deep into Sunnydale's maze of caverns for comfort (she had taken the right-hand fork when the tunnel split, hadn't she?) It was the wrong side of midnight on a Friday evening, and Tara could be waking up at any minute and wondering where the hell she was. She'd just summoned up something that looked like a Balrog on steroids, and last but not least, Willow Rosenberg, Wicca Supreme, had acquired a crowd of truly wiggins-inducing groupies.

The eyeless men shuffled into the cavern, gaunt Blair Witch stick-figures with leathery skin stretched over gangly limbs, filthy rags draping their bodies like Spanish moss. They carried staves hung about with bones and feathers and small sickening dried things the color of old blood. Their withered eyesockets were sewn over with a double X of coarse brown twine, but they padded across the uneven floor of the cavern with never a pause or stumble. Bare feet scuffed and whispered against the stone. Twiggy fingers reached out for her, straining to be first to touch her hair or grasp the hem of her sleeves. "The vessel," they murmured in chorus.

Willow's face twisted in revulsion, and she slapped the eagerest hands back with a fizzing shower of blue sparks. "Hey! No touchy!"

The eyeless men cringed away, some prostrating themselves, others raising their staves and beginning a reedy chant. The thing she'd summoned laughed, and dwindled down, splashes of red and green and alabaster blossoming out of the darkness. "Bad puppies," her vampire self crooned, flicking a riding crop at the nearest supplicant. "No treats for you. Down."

"Is it vitally necessary for you to look like that?" Willow asked. "It's ooky. And if the purpose is to unnerve me, hey, already existing in a nerve-free void."

Color leached away and the clear heartless peal of laughter deepened and roughened as the phantom scent of tobacco smoke tickled her nose. The thing inclined its bone-and-ivory head, regarding her with luminous blue eyes. "I can look like anyone, pet." Another shift--her mother's distant, accusing face looked back at her, a little frown pinching her perfectly penciled brows. "It's just a phase, Willow. You need to work through this stage and return to a healthy phase of ego development."

"Stop that!"

Her own chirpy grin returned. "Givin' you the wiggins?"

Willow unzipped her duffle and began pinching out the wicks of the half-melted candles, stuffing them back inside beside the Ziploc bags of frankincense. "You're trying to scare me? OK, I'm scared. Woo frickin' hoo." She grabbed another candle and yanked it free of the spot where its own drippings had welded it to the stone floor of the cavern. The scent of melted wax and licorice made the still air of the cavern seem stuffy, despite the underground chill, and she wondered if licorice was maybe an extra-evil scent, candle-wise. "I've been scared pretty much twenty-four-seven for the last six years straight and fought vampires and demons and hellgods and furthermore given oral reports in front of the entire class without fainting and all this stuff I do while shaking in my high-heeled boots, so you may as well just give it up and head back to Dodge, because scaring me? Waste of time. I did what you wanted me to--you're all manifested and everything. I've got my magic back. I'm happy, you're happy, everything's coming up sunshine and puppies, so we're finished, 'kay? No more little voices in my head, no more oogy visions, no further doorstep-darkening of any variety on either of our parts."

Vampire-Willow perched on an outcropping of stone and swung her legs back and forth. "Aw. Don't you like me, Snuggles? We could have lots of fun. But if you don't want to play--"

Her hand described a languid circle in the air, a gesture which Willow was morally certain was just for show. As the pale fingers completed their revolution, she felt... void. Her insides drained away into nothingness, and the raw dry ache as the power leached out of her soul was unbearable. She knelt on the cold stone, gravel digging into her knees--the center of her being was a vacuum; how could nothingness torment her so? With physical pain, at least she could point to it and say _my hand hurts_. "Bye-bye now," Vampire-Willow said, waggling her fingers.

"What did you do?" Panic drove Willow's voice to an undignified squeak. The muscles in Willow's hands spasmed and she dropped the candle she'd been about to toss into the duffle; it hit the ground with a waxy thump and rolled away into the darkness. Some bean-counting part of her mind which had become too thoroughly caught up in Buffy's budget woes thought grouchy thoughts about the waste of a perfectly good candle, though it really was kind of gross-smelling and if licorice-scented candles _were_ extra-evil it wasn't like she could recycle them in another ritual.

"No-thing," her alter ego sang. "Nothing at all. I stopped doing." She got up and slink-strutted over to Willow with a sly, I've-got-a-secret smile, slapping the riding crop against her palm. "You don't have your magic back, clever witch, you have my magic back." Her lashes fluttered. "And you can keep it as long as you do me little favors. I like people who do me favors." She flicked the riding crop out, just short of tapping Willow on the nose, and power rushed back into the void within. Magic surging through all the empty channels of Willow's soul, monsoon rains following on the heels of a summer drought, sparkling, effervescent, limitless, bubbling up to soothe every ravaged nerve.

Willow moaned in near-orgasmic relief as the nameless, bodiless ache dissolved before the flood, but the relief fled before a desire to scream like a frustrated two-year-old. _It's not FAIR! I want my magic back NOW!_ She dug her nails into the surface of the nearest candle, leaving little crescents in the wax. _OK, fine, Willow doesn't get what she wanted. Again. Big news, not. Repress, retreat, regroup, the Rosenberg family motto._ She snuck a look at her alter ego. It couldn't hurt to ask. "What kind of favors?"

Vampire-Willow draped herself across a boulder and sucked on the tip of her index finger. "Ooooh, lots of terrible, naughty things... or not. Who knows? Right now, three things, and if you do those, I'll let you do anything else you like until I need you again. That's not a bad bargain, is it, to have your wings back?"

"No, it sounds pretty suckified, in an open-ended, indentured-for-life kinda way." Willow crossed her arms and sat back on her heels. "But from the absence of any overwhelming zombie compulsion to go and work your naughty will, I'm beginning to get the idea that you can't make me do anything I don't want to. Aren't you going to, like, slap a lien on my soul or something?"

The image writhed, and now it was the lean, tired countenance of Daniel Tanner looking at her. "Souls are highly overrated as a medium of exchange. Why don't you see what's required of you? Your first task would be to restore the minds of the people living in the landfill."

Willow blinked. She'd been expecting a request for roast babies or something. "I was going to do that anyway."

"You see? I'm not unreasonable." Another shift of light and shadow, and Giles was standing there before her, wearing his old librarian's armor of tweed and reserve. "My second request is also simple." _Flicker._ Dawn's gangly form stood in his place. "Use the girl as the power source for the spell."

"What?" Darn. Here it comes, the soul-sucking evil part. "Dawnie? I can't do that!"

Dawn's image reverted to Giles's again. "Indeed you can--you've thought of it before now. No harm will come to her from it, I give you my word on that." Modifications to the spell she'd been working on leaped into her mind full-formed. "The Key has tremendous power, enough to open every gateway between every world simultaneously. To siphon off a tithe of that power to heal the minds of so many will harm nothing."

She could see it unfurling in her mind's eye, the elegant way that Dawn's latent power could be transformed into the mental energy necessary to repair the damage done to Glory's victims. When she'd designed her revamped version of the spell to draw energy from an external source, could she truthfully say she hadn't been thinking about something like this? "If you've got all this vast cosmic power, why do you need me?"

Faux-Giles shrugged and began to polish his glasses. "It's all rather torturous, really," the measured English voice said, reflective. "I was, er, evicted from this little corner of reality some years previously. Since then my associates--" he waved at the huddle of eyeless men-- "have recouped their numbers, and recent events have made it possible for them to grant me access to this plane once more. Mr. Tanner became, quite accidentally, the focus of an incident which, while insignificant in and of itself, proved to be the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back. I suppose you know there are two forces at work in the cosmos--Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos, Creation and Destruction--call them what you will. At present the balance between them is threatened, and I am doing my small part to restore it."

Willow frowned. "So you're kinda like that guy Buffy met back when Angelus was on the rampage? Whistler?"

An expression of distaste crossed the Giles-face. "Not precisely. But you might say we're in the same line of work. In any event, my associates established a rapport with Mr. Tanner, and Mr. Tanner was able to perform a few minor services for me--in the main, putting me in a limited form of contact with you. However, he is neither skilled nor stable enough to perform the ritual which you just performed, which now allows me to channel my not inconsiderable powers through you to affect the material world. I have power; I desire agency. You have agency; you desire power. What is more logical than that we ally and benefit one another?"

Willow plucked at the strap of her duffle, fiddling with the frayed spot where the buckle rubbed, little fuzzy nylon fibers frizzing beneath her fingers. It couldn't force her to do anything. Check. It would give her the ability to use magic again. Check. And it hadn't asked her to do anything in the roast baby category yet. Check. "Ok. What's the third thing?"

*****

It had been considerably easier checking into a hotel in the middle of the night back in the days when he could just eat the desk clerk and take over the presidential suite. On the other hand, Spike had to admit that Hank Summers's impressive credit limit proved almost as effective as raw terror in securing them a room despite their disheveled state. One impassioned wheedle of the hotel laundry staff and a very long, hot shower involving several brilliant shags later, they'd arrived at that drowsy, almost-sated point where giving it another go and lying there and falling asleep were equally attractive options. Spike made yet another mental note: _Install shower in crypt immediately if not sooner._ He supposed they could use the one at Buffy's place, but the Niblet's banging on the door and yelling at them to hurry up in there would be something of a mood-killer.

A tsunami of applause burst from the television. "Oi, that's a cheat if I ever saw one!" Spike aimed the remote at the screen like a weapon and zapped the Iron Chef into cable oblivion. "The challenger had it locked up! That simpering little bint's probably shagging Morimoto on the side--explosions of happiness in her mouth my arse!"

"I refuse to take sides," Buffy said. She was curled up beside him on the rumpled expanse of the hotel bed, wearing an oversized t-shirt in bright pink emblazoned with I SAW THE STARS COME OUT IN HOLLYWOOD in gold glitter--not exactly high fashion, but when one was trying to find replacement clothing at eleven o'clock at night, it didn't do to quibble about what presented itself in the hotel gift shop. "To do so would be to admit that sea urchin is a real food. What else is on?"

Spike began power-flipping through the channels. "Got to be something on with explosions in it."

Buffy made a half-hearted attempt to snag the remote. "How can you tell if it's any good when you never stop on one channel for more than half a second?"

"Superior vampire eyesight and fifty years of telly-watching savvy. It's a knack." He brought the remote to a screeching halt on John Cleese banging a stuffed parrot on a counter. "There's quality multicultural programming for you."

Buffy rolled her eyes and settled back at his side, holding up one foot and wiggling her toes in front of the glowing screen. "So, this waking up together thing--if it becomes a habit, will you still love me when I've got leg stubble and a dead cat on my head?"

Apparently she'd failed to notice the post-shower exploded poodle on his--though from the way her fingers kept sneaking up to play with the curls he was beginning to get the horrid suspicion that she liked it that way. If so, she was in for a disappointment; not even the Slayer could come between him and his century-long love affair with Brilliantine and its chemical descendants. _I draw the line at looking like sodding Little Lord Fauntleroy_. "Pet, I'll even let you borrow my razor. Greater love hath no man."

Buffy laughed and Spike grew thoughtful. Short of that first night in the Magic Box and last night at her father's place, they'd not had much opportunity to wake up together--one or the other of them always had to drag themselves out of bed and back to their own domicile in the brightening dawn. And it was only going to get more inconvenient come summer when the nights grew shorter...

Somewhere in the back of his skull, Manly!Independent!Spike grabbed Soppy!Romantic!Spike by the lapels and gave him a good smack across the chops. _Bloody hell, you're not thinking of moving in with the chit?_ Well, of course--who was he kidding? Soppy!Romantic!Spike would have been picking out rings and composing pathetic speeches about having a man in the house and making an honest Slayer of her by now if it were an option. Just seeing her wear that old ring of his around her neck made him burst with possessive male pride. Manly!Independent!Spike was reluctantly forced to agree that this was a bit of all right, and when Insatiable!Horndog!Spike chimed in with the point that shared quarters would allow for a lot more quality shagging time, Manly!Independent!Spike threw up his hands and retired to the cerebellum for a good sulk.

Not that his moving in was really an option either, given the vigilance of Dawn's social worker. But there was a middle ground here, wasn't there? "Or bring your own--I can spare a drawer."

Buffy's hand, which had been playing idly across his stomach, tracing the muscles up and down, stopped dead, and she said in a small quivery voice, "You'd give me a drawer?"

He sat up and looked into her welling sea-green eyes and ran a thumb over the sweet curve of her lower lip, bewildered. They didn't look like unhappy tears. "Sure, love. A whole dresser, if I can find one good enough to cart home."

She gave a little gulping sob and threw her arms around him; Spike had no idea what it was he'd said, but apparently it had been very much the right thing to say. Buffy pressed him down into the nest of hotel pillows as her mouth sought his, her fingers splayed across his chest to cover as much skin as possible: _All this belongs to me_. Spike shifted beneath her and ran a hand over the curve of her hip, up the rising slope of her body. His palm cradled the soft weight of her breast, her mortal warmth seeping into his flesh like liquid gold. Buffy made a kitteny little "mmmm" noise as his thumb drew lazy circles on the crinkling aureole, and she squirmed most gratifyingly as he tweaked the firm little nub in its center. Why was it that copping a feel under the t-shirt was somehow sexier than doing the same thing when she was stark naked?

Though stark naked had its own advantages. One small warm hand crept down under the covers and started to demonstrate a few of them, and when she had him thrumming like a high-tension wire in a hurricane she crawled astride his hips and sank down, engulfing him in a series of lascivious little wriggles. "You're blocking my view of the telly, woman," Spike growled, mock-severe. Buffy gave him a smug little smile and rocked forward, pulling the t-shirt over her head oh so slowly, revealing slim hips, flat belly, twin cherry-tipped ice-cream-scoop breasts... _Oh, yeeessss_. Golden hair cascaded round her shoulders as the shirt came off altogether, and the muscles in her belly and thighs went taut as she tightened her internal vise-grip on his cock. His voice went hoarse and his hips bucked involuntarily. "And you can keep right on doing it."

In the prosaic sixty-watt glow of the bedside lamp her eyes held him mesmerized with their changes: storm-tossed green, misty grey, every shade in between. Her hand brushed his cheek. "Talk to me, Big Bad," she whispered. It was an order.

He laced his hands behind his head--he'd obey, oh, yeah, but he'd take his time about it. "Yeh? What about?"

That sinful little pink tongue-tip darted out for a second, and her cheeks flushed a matching pink. "You know."

"Oh?" He bucked again, deliberate this time, caught her around the waist and held her there for a second in mid-air, half-impaled and gasping, before letting her sink down on him again, the sweet slippery-warm friction making him groan. "You wanna hear what a naughty bitch you are?" She nodded, a fractional bob of her head, still drowning him in those eyes. "How walking down the street watching that sweet little arse of yours twitch makes me want to throw you down on the sidewalk and fuck you raw right there? Someday I'm gonna do it, and you won't be able to stop me--you won't want to stop me." She was writhing slowly against him now, every movement sending little shudders of bliss through both of them. "We'll be screwing on the sidewalk come morning, and the sun won't be able to bloody touch me 'cause you'll have sent me up in flames already. Oh, yeh, love, just like that, wring me dry..."

Buffy said very little when they made love--when pressed she retorted that he talked enough for the both of them--but she listened, oh, she listened. She made an epic of their lovemaking, scribing the lines with teeth and nails across the ivory parchment of his flesh, her hands moving incessantly over his body, seeking out every sensitive inch of him, memorizing the planes and curves of muscle and bone. She reared above him, his golden goddess, his lost little girl, his Slayer--moist and warm, lips half-parted, a trickle of sweat drawing a path between those small perfect breasts. She rolled beneath him, her body the violin to his bow, seperately mute but together drawing forth the music of the spheres until they arrived at the coda together, and then--then at last she cried out Spike! Just that, as if his name were the most important thing in the world, the only possible thing to say at the moment when all the universe stopped, breathless, waiting upon the fulfillment of their pleasure.

Afterwards she lay panting across him, her ear pressed to his chest as if the silence within were music, and his own breathing slowed and finally segued into a low growl--absolutely, positively, definitely a growl, since chip or no chip he'd rip the lungs out of anyone who suggested he was capable of anything so nancified as a purr. "So does any random offering of used furniture get me this kind of treatment?"

Buffy giggled. "No, just drawers. It's a long story. Damn it!" She sat up, misty romantic Buffy instantly replaced with pissed-off Buffy. "Anya's wedding shower is tomorrow afternoon!"

"And?" Possibly there were world-threatening and shag-interrupting implications in a gaggle of demon bints and assorted members of Sunnydale's Business and Professional Women Association getting blitzed on wine coolers and regaling Anya with dirty jokes and a variety of embarrassing underthings, but if so, Spike failed to see them. Hmm. Focus on the embarrassing underthings.

Buffy made a wry face. "And it'll look pretty shoddy if I don't have a present for her. Especially since her maid of honor is another vengeance demon, who, for all I know, specializes in non-present-givers." She crawled over to the edge of the bed and leaned over, scrabbling for the t-shirt. "I have the wedding present budgeted, but I completely spaced on the shower, and--"

Her backside bobbed enticingly in the air, a perfect, luscious peach just waiting for someone to... Insatiable!Horndog!Spike took over and he lunged, wrapping his hands around her waist, just above arch of her hips--she was such a tiny thing; he could almost circle her waist with his fingers--and had her back on the bed and pressed tightly against him in one effortless heave, his rapidly hardening cock resting in the warm cleft of her ass. He drew a fingernail lightly down the side of her neck and rasped into her ear, "Still got your Dad's plastic, don't you?" Buffy gasped and nodded, momentarily incapable of coherent speech. "And you've got to take the dinner togs back anyway, so--just--aahh, you like that, Slayer? I thought so--pick up something then."

"It wouldn't--" Her eyes closed and she broke off into a high-pitched whimper as he slid into her again. "Oh. God. Spike. Ohhhh..." And she was arching forward to allow him better access to that impossibly tight velvet warmth, drawing him deeper and deeper...

Some considerable time later, the TV burbling on unwatched in the background, Buffy mumbled, "...be right to use Dad's card," into the pillow. She opened one eye and perked up slightly. "You know, I really think we're getting the hang of the not wrecking the furniture thing. Everything's still flat. No saggy spots."

Spike spat out a strand of her hair and propped his head up on one hand, cocking an eyebrow at the bed, which, while not a complete loss, looked rather the worse for wear. "That would be because we're on the floor now, pet. But if we straighten out that leg and prop the wastebasket under that corner they won't notice a thing." He rolled over, spooned up against her and began kneading her shoulders. "No sponging off Daddikins, then--I think this conscience business is highly over-rated." He sucked in his cheeks and thought for a moment. There was another possibility. "I know you haven't been keen on it in the past, love, but--assuming no one's gotten to it already--we could stop back by the restaurant and prise out a few of those Rudnark teeth. They're not stunningly valuable, but a dozen or so of 'em would fetch enough on the black magic circuit to pay for a present that wouldn't make Demon Girl give you the fish-eye the moment her magical ability to divine price tags comes into play."

Buffy stirred uneasily against him. "Black magic circuit? What are they used for?"

He shrugged. Why was that any concern of theirs? "This, that--curses mostly, I think."

She was frowning--tempted, he could tell. "So we'd be selling something that someone else could use to turn someone into a frog or afflict them with ever-growing nose-hair?"

Spike chuckled. "More like excruciating pain in the gut until they fall over frothing blood at the mouth and--" Buffy's shoulders locked solid beneath his hands. _Bloody hell. Idiot. Does it never occur to you to lie to the girl?_ No, it didn't, and it wouldn't matter if it had; the two of them could see through each other's deceptions as if through clear glass. He wracked his mind for something to make it right again, but rights and wrongs were hopelessly mixed up in his sex-muddled brain at the moment. Surely there was some rule about it, like not going swimming for half an hour after a meal--no man should be required to think for thirty minutes after an orgasm? It was hard enough to mix and match the things his mind labeled good and bad with the often diametrically opposed things which brought a glow of satisfaction to his heart under ordinary circumstances. "Which would, uh, be a bad thing?"

"A very bad thing," Buffy said through clenched teeth. She sat up and wrapped the sheet around herself, looking small and cold and forlorn for all the anger in her eyes.

"Well... it's not like we'd be cursing people ourselves," Spike offered. That was good, wasn't it? Buffy gave him a withering look, and he began to get irritated. Couldn't she see he was trying here? Did she have any clue how difficult it was to navigate your way through life backwards, fighting your basic inclinations every step of the way? "Oh, come on, love, Demon Girl's got a wagon-load of things for sale in the Magic Box that're the dog's bollocks for cursing! It's all right for her to do it because she's got a soul and a tax number?"

The mule-stubborn look crept into Buffy's eyes, and Spike knew with sinking certainty that it didn't matter what got said from here on in, he was battling for a lost cause. "Giles and Anya don't sell anything that can _only_ be used to hurt people!"

Well. Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. _Gonna learn sooner or later, love, demons live for a good fight_. "Right. I'll wager 'only' doesn't matter a lot when you've been a sodding rat for the last three years."

"Don't bring Amy into this! She did that to herself and Willow's been trying--"

"Oh, yes, Willow's been very trying."

"Don't change the subject!"

"And what is the bloody subject, Your Majesty?"

"You trying to talk me into selling dangerous demon parts on the black market! It's wrong!"

"'It's wrong!'" Spike mimicked. "Well if they weren't bloody dangerous they wouldn't be worth selling, would they? You seemed happy enough to consider it when you thought they were only good for frog-curses, but--"

"Oh, shut up!" Buffy turned away and huddled under her sheet. "Why do you have to be so--so--"

Spike cursed under his breath; she looked ready to burst into tears, and if she did he'd melt as usual and end up petting her head and agreeing with anything just to get her to stop. "Evil? Sorry, love, it comes with the fangs."

She sniffled. "No! If you were just evil I could kill you! But you have to be s-so damned g-good to me at the same time!" She wiped her nose on a hank of sheet. "I was halfway to talking myself into it when 'excruciating pain' came up. And I shouldn't have been. Frogs aren't any more of the good than frothing blood at the mouth." Her eyes were haunted for a moment. "There really is something dark in me."

Spike sighed. "Yeh, but that's not it, pet." He stretched out a hand; after a moment she scooted over and curled into his arms. "Observe. Buffy Summers considers selling nasty demon bits to the unscrupulous: result, wracking guilt. William the Bloody, Esq. considers same: result, mild irritation that B. Summers won't let him go for it." She shot him a heartrending look and, as predicted, the remains of his ire dissolved faster than an ice cube on a Sunnydale sidewalk in July. "Ah, love, I'm sorry I brought it up. I haven't gone daft enough to care about people who aren't us yet, but I could do a better job of pretending."

"Don't." Her voice was tight and hard. "Don't ever pretend. You promised."

"So I did. It cannot be said I'm a flattering honest man, but I am a plain-dealing villain. I'm trying, love, I just--" How was it he could face down Rudnark demons without blinking an eye and be so helpless in the face of her tears? "When it gets past 'Eating people bad, Buffy pretty' I don't even know where to begin sometimes."

Buffy cast her eyes down, as much to hide her smile as anything else, twisting the sheet in her fingers into little horns of fabric. If he could get a grin out of her, he couldn't have cocked up too badly, could he? "That's the important thing, I guess," she said, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself as much as him. "That you're trying." Then her mouth firmed and she looked up, meeting his eyes again. "No. The important thing is _we're_ trying." She reached up and ran a finger down the acute angle of his cheek, tracing the intersecting curve of his lower lip. "It's just... every now and then it hits me. You're not just pretending, or trying to annoy me. You really, truly don't get it, here." She placed a hand over his heart. "Sometimes it's as easy as breathing, loving you. Then a minute later it's the hardest thing I've ever done."

"I could say the same, and for some of us breathing takes a little extra effort." Spike pulled her down into the pillows again and held her close. "But I've always done things the hard way."

He wondered if he'd ever get it. Angel could afford to believe in miracles; Spike was grateful for a lack of disasters. Did he really want to? Angel's getting it hadn't been a pretty sight. In his clearer-eyed moments he could see that his moral existence from now on would likely consist of a Red Queen's race to stay where he was now. With Buffy a warm, sleepy, comfortable weight in his arms, where he was now did not seem such a bad place to be. They lay there together, wrapped up in each other and their own thoughts, until the hotel's wake-up call startled them back to the world again.

*****

Sunlight was filtering through the blinds, gilding the sedimentary layers of books and papers spread out before him. Giles excavated his saucer, took another sip of lukewarm tea and laid his glasses down on the page before him. He'd heard the morning paper thump against the door half an hour ago, but hadn't gone out to retrieve it yet. Xander and Anya had begged off on him hours ago, and he was left the sole defender of a play-fort of paper and calfskin. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the grit under his eyelids. Fit as he kept himself, his fiftieth birthday was looming nearer and nearer, and he no longer possessed the resilience to bounce back from all-nighters with nothing more than a pot of tea and a cold shower. He'd have to get more sleep before tomorrow if he and Tara planned to attempt to contact any of the powers which seemed to be circling Sunnydale like sharks.

The last few days had been too late to bed, too early to rise, too many journals to pore over, and frustratingly little gold sieved from the gravel: a handful of volumes out of the stacks of dozens of bound Watchers' diaries which barricaded the kitchen table. Accounts of those few Slayers who'd survived as long or longer than Buffy Summers, four hundred years worth of observation and expertise--to go back further he'd have had to contact the Council Library in London, and he wasn't sure he wanted to let anyone else know the direction his researches were tending yet.

Even in light of the cursory reading he'd been able to give each case history so far, there was a definite pattern emerging. Slayers who lasted four or more years followed one of two paths: For most, increasing emotional isolation and intense focus on their slaying, sometimes to the point that they were barely able to function outside a combat situation. In a smaller number of cases... well, in Buffy he would have called it normal behavior--rebellion against Council strictures, over-reliance upon emotion, increasing independence. Most of this smaller group, he noted, shared Buffy and Faith's history of having been missed by the Council's screening processes, and had grown up without the years of indoctrination concerning their destiny. They often had families, ties to the world of the living.

And almost without exception, they had ended as Faith had: going rogue, succumbing to the dark lure of their own power, throwing off their Watcher's guidance and striking out on their own. He scanned the list of names on the legal pad, checking it against the books he'd pulled. A dozen girls, a dozen lives. Could he read between the lines of the dry, scholarly reports, discern which of these rebellions were the perfectly normal result of a young woman realizing that her life was not her own, and which were true descents into darkness?

_Hannah Griesenger, Salzburg, Called 1623, died 1628, avenging the deaths of her family against the counsel of her Watcher. Maria Lupe Hernandez, Mexico City, Called 1732, disappeared 1737, reappeared and died 1739 in a battle with reawakened Aztec jaguar spirits. Kathrine Allston, Edinborough, Called 1868, died 1877, turned rogue, slain by Council forces in an attempt to restrain her. Linnet Almont, Marseilles, called 1904, died 1911, staked by her Watcher Vincent Marron after being turned by the Master of Marseilles.._.

He got up and stretched, walking a few paces round the table and feeling all his bones creak in protest. Some future Watcher, no doubt, would be reading about him: _Buffy Anne Summers, Sunnydale, Called 1996, died 1997, 2001 et al., drove Watcher Rupert Giles to drink with a succession of vampire lovers._

There was so much left to do before he left--complete the interview project with Spike, give Buffy all possible information relevant to Travers's hints, complete the paperwork signing over the Magic Box to Anya... not to mention the personal packing and sorting he had yet to take care of. He gazed nearsightedly about the room, allowing himself a short wallow in mild despair. How he was to complete it all by the New Year he had no idea...

_You could always stay_.

He walked back to his chair and sat down, sliding his glasses back into place. Spike's advice was nothing he hadn't thought of himself, lying awake in the night in the weeks after Buffy had returned from the dead. He had no doubt that Spike had meant it from the heart, however bluntly it had been phrased, and as far as it went, it was true. But Spike, at heart, was a pack animal: for all he played at being the cat who walked by himself, he craved a place at the hearth with the same intensity he craved blood--though having attained it, he'd grumble loudly about how much better it was to walk by his wild lone. Giles, on the other hand--he'd been thrust by circumstance into the center of a group, but while he loved Buffy as a daughter and looked fondly upon Willow as a protégé, he couldn't exactly call any of them friends. There was a reserve between them, a gap of age and attitude bridged more easily by a hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire than by a forty-some-year-old introvert.

It wasn't only emotional cowardice which drove his flight, he argued, addressing the silent, skeptical presence in the back of his skull. He'd never asked to become a father figure, and felt himself ill-suited to the task. He was homesick for green fields and fogs and buildings that were older than he was and an ocean that was grey and stormy rather than blue and placid. He wanted a life of his own again, and conversations with people who had both personal recollections of the world prior to 1980 and a pulse.

The phone rang. He sat there through three rings, debating whether or not to let the answering machine get it, and finally rose and picked it up on the fourth. "Giles," the voice on the other end said. "It's Angel."

After four years his fingers still tightened painfully on the receiver at the sound of that voice. 'How nice to hear from you' seemed inappropriate somehow. Giles could think of only one reason for Angel calling at this particular time, but if Buffy hadn't confessed yet, it wasn't his place to give the game away. "You sound perturbed." Keeping his voice neutral around the vampire was second nature by now, because he was an adult, and a compassionate man, and Angel was not Angelus. _Not at the moment, anyway_. "I hope nothing untoward's happened to Buffy?" There was a nervy edge to Angel's normally laconic delivery. "That depends on your definition of untoward. Are you aware of--has she--" Giles realized that in some odd way the vampire was trying to spare his feelings, and felt a reluctant gratitude. "Buffy and Spike seem to be very... close. Closer than--I'm worried about her."

Giles picked up his teacup. There must be a technical term for the defensiveness roused by an outsider questioning one on a decision which, until that moment, one might have been willing to admit was less than optimal. "Yes, I'm aware of the situation. I'm no more pleased about it than I was about her liaison with you, but in the end, I trust Buffy to do the right thing. And oddly enough, I trust Spike to do the right thing for Buffy, if not the right thing in general." Enough to leave the two of them together half a world away? Manifestly so. How very peculiar.

Angel's laugh was bitter. "I guess Spike's not the only one who's fallen into bad habits. Giles--Buffy told me the purpose of her trip down here was to convince the Council to give her and Faith a salary. Do you think that her... liaison with Spike is going to impress the Council? You know it's going to get to them sooner or later."

Giles swirled the dregs of his now-cold tea around in the bottom of his cup, watching the erratic orbits of the flecks of tea leaf. Jenny had read tea leaves--for fun, she'd said; they were utterly useless as a method of divining the future. "No. I think they'll be appalled, with good reason. I expect threats, ultimatums and possible attempts on Spike's, er, life. And in the end..." He found that he was smiling, ever so slightly. "I expect Buffy to win, because that's what Buffy does."

Angel was silent for a long while. "I don't think I expected you to be taking it this calmly."

"Neither did I, really, but apparently I have hidden depths. And if she must be enamored of a vampire, I find the current situation vastly preferable to the two of them sneaking about behind my back."

Silence again. A hit, a palpable hit... "I suppose you're prepared to stake him the moment there's a sign of anything going wrong?"

"You suppose correctly. And Angel--I hope it need not be said that while the Council will find out about this eventually, later is preferable to sooner?"

Another bitter chuckle. "Well, remember this, Giles--with Spike, the moment you realize something's gone wrong is already far too late. I speak from personal experience."

And with that he hung up, leaving Giles to the contemplation of his tea leaves. A hat, was it? He rotated the cup. Or a boat? Giles set the receiver down and took the cup into the kitchen, rinsed it out, and put it into the dishwasher. With another weary stretch he left the kitchen and started up the stairs towards his bedroom.

So much depended upon one's point of view.

*****

"I'm sure we rolled these up last year." Dawn hauled another olive-green tangle Christmas lights out of the box and tugged on one of the looser coils, which had the effect of drawing three other loops more tightly about each other. "We always roll them up."

"Maybe you forgot," Tara said. "Last year was pretty hairy, with your Mom sick." It was more likely, she thought, that Joyce had rolled them up every year; she remembered all the little things which had inexplicably gone undone after he own mother's death, things she never could remember seeing her mother actually doing. She pulled out another box of ornaments--like most of the others, missing at least one ball. Dawn took it from her and stared at the fragile glass spheres, tracing the curve of one, then another, with her index finger. When Dawn had come into existence, had some of them disappeared, to correspond to the ones a small child would have broken over the years? Or had memories rearranged themselves to give half of the young Buffy's breakage quotient to her new sister?

If Dawn still thought about things like that (and Tara imagined she did) she didn't share them with anyone, save perhaps Spike. Now she set the red and gold balls aside, flicked her hair over her shoulders and dove back into the cardboard box, pulling out another rat's-nest of lights and frowning at it. "This is totally skanked up. All the sockets are, like, corroded or something. Maybe we should just buy new ones. They're only three or four dollars a string these days."

"Just remember, money spent on lights is money that can't be spent on presents."

Tara felt a wave of relief which dissipated as soon as she realized that the speaker wasn't Willow. Buffy was standing at the top of the basement stairs, with Spike right behind her, gazing curiously over her shoulder at the sea of ravaged boxes covering the basement floor.

"Buffy!" Dawn dropped the coil of wire and leaped to her feet, her face lighting up. "You're home!" Suddenly self-conscious, she tossed her hair again and affected indifference. "Not that I care or anything. Hey, Spike."

"Hullo, Bit." Spike looked askance at the holiday wreckage. "Now I'll grant traditions may have evolved, but in my day we decked the halls, not the floor."

Tara held up a plastic holly wreath and peered through it, suddenly nostalgic for real evergreen boughs and pine scent that didn't come from an aerosol can. "We decided on a post-modern, deconstructionist Christmas this year. I'm so glad you're back," she said, getting to her feet. "Did everything go all right?"

Buffy paused at the foot of the stairs, posed, and made a 'voila!' gesture with both hands. "I didn't kill Faith, Angel didn't kill Spike, everyone's still in the correct body, it's all good." She walked over to the nearest box and dropped to her knees. "Oh--Aunt Caroline's bells!" She pulled out a set of spun-glass bells which had fallen out of their tissue wrapping and held them up to the light, inspecting them for damage. "And here's Norton the Christmas Moose--" Spike, looking slightly ill, mouthed 'Christmas Moose?' at Tara, who shrugged. Buffy extracted a rather moldy-looking plaster moose with a tatty green pipe-cleaner wreath in its chipped horns. Her face fell. "Dawn made him for Mom in fourth grade--he's lost all his sequins! What happened to this stuff? It wasn't like this when I died, I know it!" Her expression was more tragic than one sequin-less moose seemed to warrant. "Dawn?"

Dawn, distraught as if the lack of Christmas ornament continuity were her personal failing, rummaged through her own box for something salvageable. "The pipes down here burst a month or so before you, uh, got back, and the basement flooded, and the people who were gonna buy the house backed out before Dad could get them to close, and Dad had to get the whole house re-piped before he could put it back up for sale--boy was he mad! But anyway, all the stuff we had stored down here got soaked. I tried to dry out as much as I could before we had to put all the furniture into storage, but Dad wanted to--and I--and it's all wrecked--and--"

Buffy hastened to assure Dawn that none of it was her fault, and the two of them went into serious Christmas triage mode: "Here's those grotty plastic ones--of course _they_ survived--Oh! It's Grandma's old bubble lights! but they didn't work anyway--Here's the ones Mom bought when we moved here--The glass ones should be all right if we can clean off all this moldy tissue paper--Have you looked at the tree yet?"

Tara backed off with a certain sense of relief and sat down on the lowest step of the stairs; it was a little weird poking through the remnants of another family's past. Spike sidled over to her as the sisters exclaimed and commiserated over the various unearthed ornaments. "Where's Will? We didn't see her about when we got in."

"She's upstairs. Asleep. She--she was gone all night. Meditating, she said." Tara bit her lip. "Something to help her recover her magic. She's been conked out all day--what time is it?"

"About eight." It was occasionally handy having a vampire around with an absolute sense of the sun's position. "We left L.A. around five-thirty, soon as the sun started going down. Red hasn't been up at all?" He sounded a little concerned, and Tara felt slightly less paranoid; if Spike was worried, she had a right to be panicked.

"She got up around noon and had a peanut butter sandwich and went back to bed. I'm getting really worried about her, Spike. She's been--"

"Sleeping," Willow said, appearing at the top of the stairs in her turn, wrapped up in a robe and what she referred to as her Anya-freaking fuzzy slippers. Tara's breath caught; Willow looked... looked... glowing, her hair aflame in the light of the bare hanging bulb overhead. "Sorry for not hopping onboard the Christmas spirit choo-choo, but still technically Jewish here."

Tara scrambled to her feet and grinned, deciding that Buffy and Dawn had the ornament situation covered. "Christmas trees are a pagan tradition. I'm reclaiming them in the name of Wiccan Liberation." She smoothed her skirt around her knees and started up the stairs. "You feeling better, hon? You want me to fix you some soup?"

Willow smiled back, the cheerful pixie-grin Tara hadn't seen in far too long. "Oh... all right, twist my arm." She turned and all but skipped off towards the kitchen. Tara followed more sedately. A glance in the direction of the living room showed her Buffy's luggage and a large shopping bag stuffed with wrapped packages--probably Christmas presents from Dawn and Buffy's father--heaped haphazardly over the armchair.

Willow went over to the kitchen table and opened up her laptop, running her fingers over the keyboard as if greeting an old friend. Tara pulled a saucepan from the cupboard, ran a little water into it and set it on the stove to boil while she began rustling up ingredients--chicken stock from last night's dinner, a handful of rice, leftover vegetables from Thursday, a dash of salt, a pinch of garlic... might as well make enough for everyone. It was mildly wiggy how Willow and Buffy and Dawn, children of affluence, regarded her ability to cook and sew and clean house as something as mysterious and astonishing as her ability to cast spells. When they went shopping, Buffy followed her around the grocery store in a state of bewildered gratitude, nodding blankly as Tara dispensed domestic wisdom--Buffy could follow a recipe, but somehow she'd never learned how to _cook_. _Leftovers are your friend_, the McClay mantra. It was weird when such prosaic skills put her in demand. "So... do you think it helped? The meditating?"

Willow rested her chin in her hand and looked extremely pleased with herself. "Yup. It really did." The laptop cheeped at her. "Darn it, I have a hundred and eleven e-mails and I'm a week behind on Sluggy Freelance."

"Really? I mean about the helping, not the e-mail. You're on your own there." Tara checked the refrigerator and yelled downstairs, "Spike, we're out of pig's blood--do you--?"

A muffled bellow from below--"Got some in the boot of the car. Keys are on the coffee table."

"Thanks." She glanced at Willow. She looked so much better; relaxed, happy, that little pinched stress-line gone from between her brows. It was wonderful--almost too good to be true. "It's not too--too draining, is it, honey? The meditation, I mean. You seemed pretty wasted this morning, and you never mentioned what kind of techniques you were trying--"

A flash of irritation was there and gone in Willow's eyes. "Oh, nothing special, a little chant here, a little incense there, stretch the ol' magical muscles, om mane padme e-i e-i om... you know--eclectic." She kicked back in her chair and waggled the toes of her slippers so that the bunny ears flipped back and forth. "I don't think the major Willow zone-out will be happening again. I got a little bitty bit carried away with the whole one-with-self-and-universe-ness, is all. All better now. And looky--" She waved a hand and Spike's car keys came zipping through the air from the living room to land in her palm with a jingle. "No stress, no strain!"

"That's great!" Tara tried to quash her unease in the face of Willow's proud grin. It wasn't that she suspected Willow of taking dangerous shortcuts, but, well, Willow had been known to take dangerous shortcuts. "Just don't take it too fast--"

"Will!" Buffy's face appeared in the doorway to the basement, atop a box full of assorted Christmas junk. She maneuvered the box out into the living room and dumped down in front of the television. "Wow! You're back with the magic-slingin'! Tres cool! Are you going to be up for the big loony hunt?"

Tara started to object; no matter how beneficial Willow's new exercises might be, there was no way she'd be prepared to cast spells at that level so quickly. Before she could say anything, Dawn bounced up the stairs with another boxload of decorations, a disgruntled Spike following with an armload of metal struts and faux greenery which must have been the tree. "...goose," he was growling. "Turkey is a Yank abomination. And none of these poncy little lights, either. Candles. At least then you've got half a chance of the house burning down and injecting some fun into the holidays."

"Yeah, yeah, vampire, evil, bah humbug," Dawn said. "For a rebel you're sure an old fogey. Now put it over on the couch."

"Hey, guys, check it out," Willow said, following the parade into the living room. Tara, a feeling of inexplicable dread curling her toes, turned the heat down on her soup and tagged after. Willow took a stance in the center of the living room. She gestured dramatically, sweeping both arms in a wide circle; in the long-sleeved blue terrycloth robe there was an unfortunate echo of Sorcerer's Apprentice to the motion. "Arise, O Tannenbaum!" "Oi!" The scruffy green plastic boughs jerked to life and Spike dropped them as if they'd been dipped in holy water. He backed hastily away from the couch, wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans. "Give a bloke some warning, Red!"

Willow just grinned at him, and gestured again. Like some stop-motion animation, the central support of the tree twitched into motion and planted itself in the base, telescoping up to full height. In a flurry of artificial needles the branches assembled and rooted themselves to the trunk, whish-click-whish. Everyone stood open-mouthed until the topmost branch clicked into place. The tree leaned drunkenly to one side; Willow bent her fingers and it shivered and straightened, then shook like a dog emerging from a pool. Before their eyes the shabby old branches grew green and fresh, and the scent of pine which Tara had been missing so a moment before wafted through the living room. A shimmer of golden light washed over the boxes of ornaments, and twenty years of scuffs and chips and dings disappeared; Norton the Christmas Moose glittered with his full complement of sequins, and every single ball reflected back the light in pristine glory. One of the strings of lights reared into the air, an electrical cobra, and began to interlace itself through the branches.

"Wait, wait!" Dawn cried. "Don't!"

"Halt!" The string of lights pattered lifeless to the floor and Willow looked a little disappointed. "What's the matter? I'm not tired. Not even a tiny bit. Rarin' to go."

Dawn shuffled her feet and cast a beseeching look at Buffy. "It's just... I like decorating it. You know, by hand."

"Wow," Buffy repeated, obviously impressed. "Wills, I can't--I mean, wow. Thank you. But I think we can take it from here."

"That's half the fun," Tara said with a pointed look at Willow, who was starting to look pouty. "Besides, you should save your strength for the, uh, loony hunt."

"Oh, all right." Willow flopped down on the couch and surveyed her work with a beaming smile. "But I'm pretty sure that's not going to be a problem any more." She aimed her finger at the tree and made a trigger-pulling motion. "The big gun is _back_."


	21. Chapter 21

Seven o' clock, Sunday morning, cold as Southern California allowed and slightly foggy; earlier, before the sun had come up, breath had been visible on the still air. Daniel Tanner shuffled down the sidewalk and turned into the alley behind the Doublemeat Palace, heading for the dumpster where, if he were lucky, he'd find the leftover burgers tossed out by last night's closing shift, still safely ensconced in their greasy wrappers. A careful walk down the center of the alley, one foot before the other in the grimy trickle of condensation. Not too close to the doors, not too close to the watching huddles of trash or the looming metal bulk of dumpsters--mouths had teeth, teeth to bite with.

Lizzie had died in the night, slipped out of herself through the hole in her crushed skull and danced away with never a word, and he'd spent the rest of the night bullying a terrified Jim and Ramon into helping him move the body out of the landfill.

There was no end. There was no cure. They'd lied, the eyeless men, opened their dead mouths and spat out maggot-words that meant nothing. "There are rules," he muttered, and knew with some small part of his mind that the words were too loud, too angry, that if people heard him they would shy away. "There are limits and bounds." There were laws that circumscribed the greatest of forces, promises that had to be kept or unmake their guarantor in their neglect. He'd kept his half of the bargain, and he would see, if it meant his dissolution, that the eyeless men did likewise.

As soon as he raided the dumpster. Vengeance was a luxury reserved for those with full stomachs.

*****

Willow Rosenberg woke to the certainty of power and the sweet weight of her lover's head upon her shoulder. With her fingers she parted the netted swath of honey-blonde hair concealing her beloved's face, exposing to mortal view the shuttered eyes, the stubby dark blond lashes lying upon the silken cheek. This was Tara in a nutshell, some part of her forever aloof, forever hidden. Not by design or desire, but simply because there was always more of Tara, the farther in one went. Tara hid her serene face behind a curtain of hair, Tara hid her unfashionably lush body behind baggy sweaters, Tara hid her iron will behind a facade of diffidence. There was always one more veil to pierce, another hope that this was the final curtain and behind it the white limbs of the goddess would rise from the pool, sky-clad and radiant, and rather than striking the intruder blind would fold her to her bosom... _Now am I special enough to catch your eye? Now do I have the power to hold you?_

Tara's eyes opened, blue-grey, the color of distant mountains. Tara's lips curved, no less sweet than the curve of her hip beneath the blankets, the succulent weight of her breasts pressed against Willow's slim body. She could nestle into the comforting softness of Tara's arms, worship at the altar of her body, bury her face in the well of delight between her thighs, and Tara would cry out in joy and weep in ecstasy beneath her lapping tongue...

But there was always one more veil.

*****

Dawn Summers lay awake watching the moving shadows on the ceiling, and thought bitter thoughts about the coming appointment with her social worker. Her existence was built on a foundation of sand. The photographs hanging in the stairwell and tucked into little stick-on holders in the photo albums, bright fleeting images of vacations past. The box of report cards (A's, A's, and more A's; until last year, the _good_ sister, the smart sister, the sister who didn't burn down gymnasiums). The chess set under the bed with the broken black rook, chipped against the wall when she'd thrown it at Buffy when she was six--all, all a sham. She hadn't existed before last fall, the chess set hadn't existed. They told her it didn't matter, they told her that they loved her anyway, but in the dark hours of morning when she stared at the ceiling and thought _Who am I?_ it did matter, because they'd been made to love her.

_I steal, therefore I am._

*****

Buffy Summers dreamed.

_She didn't want to examine the darkness too closely; something prowled back there. She could hear the pad of feet on floorboards, the low growl... but she couldn't stay in bed; Willow was calling and she had to go downstairs again. She got up, her long white nightgown trailing on the floor. She took up the candle from her bedside in her hand, holding it high overhead. "Boy," she said, "Why are you crying?" _

_He looked up from his cross-legged seat on the bare wood floor, moonlight curls tumbling over the high forehead. Silver tear-tracks marked his cheeks. "I've caught it," he said, "but I can't hold on forever." His shadow stretched away into the darkness, black as jet; in its arms a bright shape struggled._

_ The thing in the darkness crept closer, and its growl muted to a pleading whine. It slunk up to rub against Spike's knee and he reached down, ruffling its fur and crooning to it. She couldn't see its face, but she could hear its claws kneading the floor. "Send it away," she whispered._

_"Can't do that, love. It's not mine. Here--you have to take this." He held out the bright shape; it flickered in his grasp and darted away into the shadows. She gasped, snatching for it, but the beast was faster, leaping after the shining figure with a snarl._

_ Spike was gone, replaced by a bespectacled young man in antiquated clothing. A green-scaled, razor-fanged demon crouched at his side. He held a hand to his mouth, hiding an apologetic cough. "I realize our situations are not precisely identical," he said. "But sooner or later one has to come to an accommodation." The demon growled agreement and bumped its nightmare head against his arm; he scratched its spiny ears fondly. For a second they looked at her with identical pairs of blue eyes before blurring together into Spike once more. The beast trotted back from the shadows, the shimmering figure held with tender care in its jaws. Spike smiled proudly and patted it on the head. "There's my girl." He looked at her. "Blood and a little kindness--best feed it, pet. They get stroppy when they're starved." He took her shadow from the beast's mouth and held it up. "Well?"_

_"Soap won't do," she said. "It must be sewn back on." She sat down on the edge of the bed, wincing in anticipation, and lifted one bare foot. He sat down tailor-fashion and pulled a needle and thread out of his duster pockets and held them up; the needle glinted bright and wicked as a dagger in the candlelight. Spike began to sew her shadow back on. She scarcely felt the first needle-pricks, but as he continued to work, the pain increased. Blood ran down his fingers, and every few stitches he stopped to lick his hands._

_"They'll never be clean, you know," he said. "And this--" He lifted one hand up, pale tongue flicking out to capture a crimson rivulet before it reached his wrist, and pointed to the limp rag-clad heap in the corner-- "Is your fault."_

_ The heap of rags was a body. The dead woman's face was pale and waxy, and the hair around the depression in her skull, smashed in as if by a length of pipe, was matted with old blood. Tanner crouched over her, looking up at Buffy with fathomless dark eyes. "Her name was Lizzie."_

_They were all looking at her, the dead woman, the living man and the undead one. The beast growled softly, uneasy. She should have known the name. "It's in a good cause," she said, hearing the weakness of her own words. "Isn't it?"_

_Spike shrugged. "We won't know for certain until it's too late, will we?" He held out his hand again, palm cupped; it was full of tiny blood-red droplets. Pomegranate seeds. "Here. You get this out of it, anyway. I can't promise they'll taste good."_

_She took the handful of seeds and regarded them doubtfully. Had she heard this story before? She could throw them away, crush them underfoot. "What about you?" she asked._

_"Ah, I've eaten already." He patted his stomach. "Came off the other tree, and I think it was green. It's given me a hell of a bellyache. May take awhile to digest."_

_Could she afford these? The budget was so tight. She felt a blunt head nudging her elbow from behind, and a warm damp tongue tickled her fingers. She wasn't ready to look it in the eye yet, but... hesitantly, she stroked the beast's muzzle. She stuffed the seeds into her mouth, crunching down hard on the pips as the juice ran down her throat, red as life's blood, red as fire, and heard the beast break into a rumbling purr. The pain wasn't in her feet any longer, but in her gut. With every stitch, the needle dug deeper, the thread grew stronger. It hurt. It hurt. It..._

The dream dissolved into shreds and tatters, leaving the bittersweet richness of pomegranate juice on the back of her tongue. Buffy lay there, unwilling to open her eyes and admit she was awake just yet. She could feel the twinge deep in her belly as her body grudgingly followed her mind into wakefulness. Damn. Cramps. It was a good sign, she supposed. Her first period since coming back, proof that all the plumbing was in working order. It was difficult to feel disassociated from reality when your uterus was tying itself in knots. She got up, checked to make sure there was no blood on the sheets, and shuffled across the hallway and into the bathroom to ransack the cabinet drawers for a tampon.

Suitably fortified, Buffy faced herself down in the mirror, scrubbed her teeth (dutifully turning off the water during; a Slayer was conservation-minded, except when engaged in hour-long hot shower orgies with the undead--but, she assured herself, it _had_ been with a low-flow shower head) and did fearless battle with the horror that was bed hair. _So this is the face of a girl who sleeps with vampires._ Funny how it didn't look that much different from the face of the girl who violently repressed any desire to sleep with vampires. Where was the mark of Cain, the scarlet letter that she could flaunt defiantly? Not even an incipient zit. Buffy bared minty fresh teeth at her reflection, spat toothpaste foam into the sink, and went back into the bedroom.

The starkness of her room dissatisfied her. The furniture was still the same--the white-painted iron bedstead, her dresser, the chairs. Dawn had saved her diaries and Mr. Gordo and one or two small things as mementoes, and Spike had rather shamefacedly returned a few photos he'd snatched after the funeral, but everything else had been thrown away or given to charity after her death: posters, knickknacks, stuffed animals, clothes, all gone. When they'd moved the furniture back from the U-Stor-It, the week after she'd returned to the land of the living, she hadn't cared. The monastic austerity of bare walls had been soothing. She went over to the suitcases she'd left behind the bed last night, opened her overnight bag, took out the copy of the _Rubaiyat_ Spike had given her, and put it on the bookshelf. It was a start.

Buffy pulled open the curtains and let the morning light flood in, looking out the window into the branches of the oak tree where another vampire had so often crouched in the wee hours of the morning. Spike just used the front door. He was a ghost in the house this morning, a blanket-stealing, bony-kneed, tobacco-breathed, too-chilly-for-December phantom with tousled platinum hair--curled at her side when she woke, standing beside her in the bathroom, sleepily scratching his chin and expounding on the art of shaving without a reflection. In a little while he'd follow her downstairs and gross out Tara with his disgusting bloodsoaked mess of a breakfast and fight with Dawn over the comic section.

If she was going to be haunted it might as well be by the real thing. For better or worse, she'd wrestled the earthshaking ethical dilemmas of their situation to a temporary standstill, and now they were left with the hard stuff. _Question: how exactly does one unemployed vampire slayer, sister and mortgage in tow, put together a life with one vampire of infinite heart and limited ethics?_ With a shake of her head she went over to the dresser, pulled out the top drawer and started tossing things onto the bed. _Answer: One drawer at a time._

"Hey, are you coming down to breakfast or not?" Dawn asked, poking her head around the door a minute later to find her sister sitting on the edge of her bed surrounded by piles of clothes and gazing blankly at the now-complete disarray of the dresser. "Tara's making pancakes. Are you zoning out again?"

Buffy picked up a pile of sensible slacks, all calculated to assure an interviewer that this, by golly, was a reliable team player, and eyed them with loathing. "I do not zone. I engage in clothing feng-shui." At one halcyon time, she'd owned six-count'em-six pairs of leather pants, seven if you included the pair that didn't quite fit because she'd lost ten pounds the year before starting college but couldn't bear to get rid of because Angel had once admitted to liking them. Maybe she could find out which thrift store had gotten the bulk of her pre-death wardrobe and buy it back at bargain prices.

Dawn looked from the clothes to the empty drawer hanging out of the dresser, and back to her sister. "Earth to Buffy!"

She was not going to blush; there was nothing to blush about. "It's for Spike. Here, hold these." Maybe if she moved the underwear to the bottom drawer... There wasn't much, mainly because half of it had been ripped to shreds in the last week and now resided in Spike's squicky-flattering collection of Stuff That Smelled Like Buffy. She was going to have to talk to him about that, though it might be a good idea to hide that t-shirt of his she'd snitched before she did so.

"Ohmigod!" Dawn squeaked, clutching the uninspiring slacks and bouncing up and down. "Is Spike moving in?"

"No!" Jump the gun much? "We've only been...um...for a week." Buffy shoved some t-shirts to one side and scrunched the slacks in beside them. "This is purely for slaying emergencies, so he'll have some things on hand if he can't get back to the crypt before sunrise." Maybe she ought to hunt up an ashtray--for the porch, because no amount of great sex was going to buy him a ticket to smoke in the house.

"Riiiight. Riley never got a drawer." Dawn flopped across the bed on her stomach and propped her head up on her hands. "You're, like, serious now, right? I mean, you're having sex. That's serious, isn't it?" At Buffy's stunned-deer expression she scowled. "Don't go all Mom-like on me. You're not Mom, you're my sister. We're supposed to talk about boys. It's in the manual."

Buffy sat down beside her. "I know, it's just--" When had Dawn gone from 'eww, boys' and safe, chaste crushes on Xander to using the word 'sex' in a grammatical sentence? "Yes, it's serious. In a way. It's--" She shifted sideways, pulling a knee up on the bed and taking Dawn's shoulders in her hands. "Complicated. Dawnie, please don't pin all your hopes on--I know you like Spike a lot, but there's all kinds of... issues. It may not work out. Things could happen--"

Dawn snorted. "No way can he lose his soul _more_."

"As if--I'm sure the next Buffy boyfriend disaster will be something entirely new and original." Buffy picked up one of the least objectionable sweaters and began re-folding it. "I just don't want to get anyone's hopes up for an ever after here, much less a happily."

Dawn regarded her with the smug and infinitely irritating wisdom of a younger sibling. "Then you should stop with the happy every time his name gets mentioned. So what's it like?"

"What?"

"Sex. Does it hurt? Is it like in those books where the--"

Buffy dropped the sweater and clapped her hand over Dawn's mouth. "Aaahh!" Deer weren't big and stunworthy enough for this expression--elk, maybe, or wildebeests.

Dawn rolled over and crossed her arms. "Geez, Buffy! It's not like I'm a quivering virgin or something--I've kissed!"

"You have? Who? Who have you kissed?!"

"It was over the summer. This guy I met at one of Janice's parties. Spike killed him."

"WHAT!?" Visions of Spike-as-chaperone, gleefully strangling some pimply and presumptuous suitor while Dawn stamped her foot and complained that he was embarrassing her swam through her head.

"Willow helped!" Dawn went into a defensive sulk. "He was kind of a vampire, and no, I didn't notice, it's not like I'm Miss Slut-Bomb 2001 with vast experience of what a vampire doesn't kiss like. Unlike some people I'm related to."

Buffy was overwhelmed with the feeling that the world in general and her sister in particular had breezed past her. Dawn lay there glowering at the ceiling, the treads of her sneakers shedding tiny flakes of dried mud onto her older sister's quilt. Fifteen was still a little kid, wasn't it? At fifteen she herself had been... stealing lipstick, shaking her pom-poms at any member of the football team whose eye she could catch, cutting class to kill vampires. _OK, bad example._ "Valiantly attempting to be the cool yet authoritative older sister here, but you can't just drop the whole sex talk thing on me like that. I have to prepare. Work up a speech. Find some hand puppets."

Dawn's eyes revolved, blue but not so innocent. "I know how it's _done_, doofus. We had the whole 'put the condom on the banana' demo in health class. I just want to know what it's _like_ . It's not like you guys were exactly quiet that night on the couch--which is still all creaky and weird to sit on, in case you care."

"Um..." How the heck did you answer a question like that? Great, until your boyfriend loses his soul and tries to destroy the world? Way to give your impressionable sister a complex. "I guess that depends on who you're doing it with. And why you're doing it. If you're with someone you love, who loves you, it's..." She bit her lip. "Life-changing. So be darned sure you want your life to change."

Maybe that had sunk in; there was a thoughtful moment before Dawn smirked in a manner entirely too reminiscent of certain vampires. "I think I'll tell Mrs. Kroger that my juvenile delinquent behavior is due to being exposed to my sister's perverted love life. Unless I get something like, say, an XBox for Christmas to drown out the gross smoochy noises in the middle of the night--"

Buffy threw a rolled-up sock at her and Dawn disappeared down the hall, cackling.

The house was filling with the heavenly odors of coffee and Tara's pancakes when Buffy came downstairs a few minutes later, mingling with the pervasive pine-scent of the Christmas tree. Buffy stopped to give it a wondering look on the way into the kitchen--decked out in tinsel and lights under Dawn's exacting artistic direction, it was the most perfect tree she'd ever seen; it could have been torn from a Currier &amp; Ives print. She ran her fingers over the needles, plucked a few off, bruised them, held them to her nose; tiny drops of resin oozed from the broken flesh. It looked, felt, smelled... alive, and yet it was growing up out of the same old tree stand. Was it all just an illusion, or had Willow really transformed their scroungy old fake Douglas fir into the real thing? Buffy had managed by dint of great effort to avoid learning anything about magic theory over the past six years, but whether this was just a fantastically detailed glamour or a real transformation, it argued serious power.

_And raising you from the dead doesn't?_

"Hey, Buff!" Willow was sitting at the kitchen table with Dawn while Tara stood over at the stove, pouring another dollop of batter into the skillet. "You made it! We saved you a few pancakes. Anya e-mailed me a copy of the ceremony we'll be doing." She passed Buffy a sheet of paper. "We're meeting at the Magic Box at nine. You get to be the la-place, whatever that is."

Buffy gave the printout a cursory glance. "I'll assume that's a good thing to be. I'm going to have to talk to Giles anyway--I think I had a Slayer dream last night."

Willow's cheery expression morphed into unease. "You think? You don't know for sure?"

Buffy shrugged and poured a generous helping of syrup over her pancakes. Mmm, buttery goodness. "As prophetic visions go, it was low on predictiness, high on annoyingly cryptic symbolism."

"I'll bet it predicted lots of broken furniture in your bedroom," Dawn said. "Ow! You can't hit me, I'm normal!"

Buffy bestowed an angelic smile on Dawn, who was rubbing her arm with an exaggerated look of agony. "That's debatable."

"Kind of a Brunel thing, sans slashed eyeballs?" Willow didn't wait for an answer, but got up and started rinsing off her plate. "I've got to head over to the Magic Box now and help Giles set up--oh, and don't take the lid off that saucepan on the back burner, cause Miss Kitty getting into it would be of the bad, unless we want a pet hermit crab--nothing against hermit crabs, they're kinda cute, but no fur, which makes the petting thing problematical--"

Buffy interrupted the babble-stream before it could develop into full-blown free association. "Dreamwise, we have death, small amounts of gore, and formless guilt. The usual." Self-analysis came about as naturally to her as the milk of human kindness did to Spike, but it didn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that part of her was expecting cosmic retribution any minute now. Good girls didn't sleep with soulless vampires. "Do you guys have the spells online for tomorrow night? I've got a job interview before lunch, and that appointment with The Kroger after lunch, but I should be free by four."

"Online, on board, on track--we are the essence of on. Be vewy quiet, we're hunting cwazies." Willow grinned, waved, and was out the door.

Buffy leaned back in her chair and watched her all but skipping down the driveway, then eyed Willow's coffee cup. "Maybe it's time to have that talk with her about decaf again."

Tara flipped the last of the pancakes onto her plate and brought it over to the table. "I think she's just jazzed about having her powers back." She didn't meet Buffy's eyes.

Well, that was understandable. If being unable to cast spells had felt anything like the dull grey misery she'd recently clawed her way out of, Buffy couldn't blame Willow for being the extra-bouncy human superball now. She felt moderately bounceable herself. She speared herself another bite of pancake and swirled it around in the pool of syrup. Plus--lucky Wills!--she wouldn't be battling the persistent worry that her recovery was bought at too high a price.

"So, what's my part in the ritual?" Dawn asked, snatching the printout and scanning it for her name.

"Right there. 'Dawn Summers, staying home and being grounded for her sordid life of crime.'"

"What?" From the tone of her sister's anguished wail, Buffy might as well have said 'Stay home and have your liver removed without anesthetic.' "That's completely unfair! I'm so telling The Kroger you abuse me!"

"Oh, yeah, you do that. 'Mrs. Kroger, my mean old sister won't let me participate in dangerous Satanic rites!' Did it ever occur to you that mystic Keys to the universe and rituals to open doors to the spirit world might possibly not be mixy things?"

"Good point," Tara said. "Though strictly speaking, Satanism isn't anything like... oh, never mind."

Dawn shot her a look of wounded betrayal. "I'll bet you just made that up."

Buffy sipped her coffee and adopted her best Sphinx-like-adult smile. "Since you're not going to be there, we'll never know, will we?"

*****

The gym mats were rolled up against the walls, fat blue coils of tarpaulin and foam. The pommel horse had been dragged aside as well and sat watching the proceedings with cockeyed dignity from the corner. Willow and Tara sat on one of the rolled-up mats, the floor at their feet awash with books dragged in from the front room of the store. Xander sat opposite them, playing around with the drum they'd lugged up from the basement, a big-bellied, cowhide-covered instrument of uncertain provenance. In the center of the training room floor, Rupert Giles crouched beside a circle of white chalk, an unlikely houngan in sneakers and sweatshirt. His hand moved over the floor, dispersing a thin, even trail of yellow corn meal from between thumb and forefinger. In its wake the sigils grew like living things: the vèvè of Legba, a crossroads atop a stylized globe, crowned with a second globe, one arm pierced with a walking stick; and the vèvè of Ghede, a tau-cross atop a mausoleum, flanked by a stylized rake and shovel on one hand and a coffin on the other. Various other items for the ritual were scattered about the floor--a squeeze bottle of water, the dish of cornmeal, and a large gourd rattle.

Buffy knelt at the edge of the circle, taking candles as Anya handed them to her from the box and setting them up around the circumference. "...nineteen, twenty. There is no way that the people who come up with these things don't own major stock in a candle factory," she grumbled, setting the last of the fat white cylinders in place and rocking back on her heels. She was dressed in training gear--leggings, a pair of worn Nikes and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

Willow flipped through a few more pages of the book she was consulting. "Are we sure this will work without the... you know? 'A speckled cock for Legba--to be killed by wringing its neck, not cutting its throat.' Cute little fluffy chickies? We can't kill cute little chickies."

Tara wrinkled her nose. "Not to encourage the blood sacrifice concept, but you've never met any roosters personally, have you?"

"There are other acceptable sacrifices," Giles said, keeping his attention on the near-complete vèvè and carefully releasing another thin stream of corn meal from between thumb and forefinger. There was something ironic--or a touch frightening--in the fact that Willow had been more willing to sacrifice a human soul than a rooster. He sometimes thought that it wasn't entirely for the best that some branches of modern Wiccan practice had so thoroughly expunged the darker aspects of the craft; it left the practitioners with no sense of proportion. "Voudoun ceremonies are remarkably amenable to, er, customization. It's the thought that counts, as it were. I've even corresponded with a vegetarian Quabbalist Mambo."

Tara laughed. "You're kidding! I love it! Go syncretism!" Buffy and Anya exchanged blank looks. Tara looked as if she were about to launch into an explanation, then thought better of it and sighed. "I guess you have to be there."

"We are here," Anya pointed out. "And yet the humor escapes us."

"All things considered--" Giles propped a small wooden cross up in the center of the circle. "We should be grateful we're only dealing with the Rada loa. The Petro loa demand pigs, goats..." _Occasionally people..._ He stepped over the ring of candles and out of the circle, careful not to disturb any of the cornmeal patterns. He contemplated the assemblage. There was something missing, the most important thing.

What were the questions he should be asking? The obvious, of course; what was drawing the powers to Sunnydale in the absence of Hellmouth rumblings, ill omens, or prophecies of any type, and what, if anything, ought they do about it? But if one was summoning up a being reputed to give unfailingly accurate advice, the temptation to ask a few personal questions as well was nigh-overwhelming. Or even, he thought, a few less-personal questions.

Candles disposed of, Buffy was limbering up, doing stretches by the weapons rack. She took one of the fencing sabers from the wall and began running through a few basic thrusts and parries, warming up for what was to come. She danced through the movements, graceful and deadly as the blades on the wall behind her, and Giles tried to put aside his personal affection and observe her with a Watcher's clinical detachment. She was near the top of her form these days, whipping through her training exercises with enthusiasm both gratifying and daunting.

Any casual observer comparing the Buffy of four or five weeks past to the girl before him now would have opined that her health, physical and emotional, had improved immensely, and the degree of improvement correlated closely with the amount of time spent with Spike. The question was, was this something which would have occurred on its own as the effects of the Raising spell faded? Was it, as a sentimentalist might have claimed, the effects of true love? Or was some other factor at work?

Buffy's exercises culminated in a full-extension lunge with the saber-tip pointing at the door. Spike appeared in the doorway a second later with a paper bag in the crook of one arm, looking sleepy (ten in the morning was an unholy time for him to be up) but unsinged; he must have come through the tunnels in the basement. Now the vampire raised an eyebrow at the sword leveled at his chest and waggled his free hand at Buffy. "Only five fingers here, Inigo." Buffy lowered the point of her sword with a grin and bounced to her feet, flinging her arms around his neck.

"They look good together, don't they?" Tara said.

"I'm not certain," Giles admitted. "I avert my eyes whenever it appears that physical contact is in the offing." Still, Tara was right; Buffy wasn't the only one who looked... he wasn't certain that one could apply the term 'healthier' to an animated corpse, but he couldn't think of anything more apt; Spike had quite lost the gaunt, hollow-eyed look he'd acquired over the summer. Giles adjusted the position of one of the candles by half an inch with the toe of his sneaker and risked a glance across the training room. Buffy still had an arm around Spike's waist and a proprietary thumb hooked through one of his belt loops, but the unseemly snog-fest had broken up and Spike was pulling things out of the paper bag: a pair of covered Styrofoam cups with the Kohlermann's logo on them, and a bottle of cheap white rum. "You have it?" Giles asked, walking over.

Spike nodded. "Yeh, buckets of it. Benny was glad to be rid of it; normally he can't give the stuff away. At least pig's blood's got body to it. Gave me a ten percent discount too, and don't mention that to his Dad--not that one, you git, that's my breakfast. Give over." He tossed Giles the other container.

Giles made a show of inspecting it, though he wasn't certain what he should be looking for; one pint of blood looked much like another to one unequipped to smell the difference. Blood from chickens of indeterminate sex and color, slaughtered at a civilized remove from the proceedings to spare the feelings of tender-hearted Wiccans; was there any virtue left in it, or would the loa dismiss it with as much disdain as Spike? Only one way to find out.

He picked up the bottle of rum, and took it and the chicken blood over to the circle of candles to join the other offerings: a plate of roasted peanuts and cornbread, a handful of pennies and a wad of pipe tobacco. He unscrewed the cap and poured a measure of the rum into a paper cup, ripped open a little restaurant packet of pepper, and dumped it into the liquor.

"This will, of necessity, be an abbreviated version of the full ceremony," he said, passing out photocopies of the responses as everyone took their places. "Unfortunately it wasn't possible to obtain the proper drapeau or--"

"And the model's not to scale and you didn't have time to paint it." Xander rolled his copy up and beat out an experimental tattoo on the drum. The resulting noise was startlingly deep, rolling through the enclosed space of the training room like tame thunder. "Spinal Tap, here I come."

Giles ignored him--ignoring Xander was often the only possible option--and picked up the rattle. "Places, everyone. Now, Xander." The drumroll sounded again, and Giles took a deep breath. "Annoncé, annoncé, annoncé!"

Buffy leaped into the center of the room, twirling the saber behind and before, dancing backwards round the ring of candles and central cross and then forwards, saluting the cardinal points of the compass on her way. Revolution completed, she brought the blade up, poised for an instant on her toes. Spike stepped into her path, weaponless, an anticipatory grin on his face. Buffy smiled back, and struck; Spike dodged, and they were off, two magnificent animals evenly matched in speed and nearly so in strength.

This was for show, only a shadow of the real battles they'd fought in the past, Giles knew, but even the shadow of that power and savagery was enough to catch the breath and speed the heart. Spike, of necessity, fought defensively, blocking, dodging, evading the lightning-swift darts of Buffy's blade. Now and again pain arced across his face as he made some move too aggressive for the chip's liking.

Giles had rather expected the glint of lust in the vampire's eyes, but it was unnerving to see it reflected in Buffy's face. Both of them were breathing hard, completely absorbed in their dance. Buffy lunged forward, the tip of the saber aimed straight at Spike's heart; she was not holding back now, as the mock-battle reached its culmination. He doubled over backwards, falling to his knees and avoiding the thrust. Spike knelt before her, visibly aroused and grinning ear to ear as she pressed the sword-tip to his chest, nicking the royal-blue fabric of his shirt. Her eyes never left the his. Slowly, Buffy lowered the sword, dropping the point to rest on the floor between Spike's knees. Just as slowly, still with his eyes fixed upon hers, Spike bent his head and kissed the hilt. A tremor ran through Buffy's body as he did so, as if the weapon were an extension of her hand.

Disturbing, very disturbing, but Giles couldn't afford to think about it just now. The spell broke; Spike rose, and the two of them backed away from one another, returning to the outskirts of the room. Willow and Tara, water bottles in hand, paced from opposite ends of the room towards the circle, pouring a stream of water behind them. As they passed, Giles intoned, "A Legba, qui garde la porte." Feet moving to the rhythm of Xander's inexpert drumming, the women pinwheeled out to the opposing set of walls and came back to the center once again, completing the crossroads of water. Giles set the offerings within the circle of candles, then knelt and picked up the dish of cornmeal, raising it overhead and drawing a crossroad in the air over the vèvès.

Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi agoe

Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi

Attibon Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi passer

Passer Vrai, loa moi passer m' a remerci loa moin.

He set the dish down and picked up a candle, repeating the gesture. "Aux Loa de feu au Sud." He passed the fingers of his left hand through the candle-flame, too quickly to take hurt, and held his hand over the vèvè.

"Ago! Ago-é!" the others chorused.

Giles picked up another water bottle, feeling a frightening elation. Save for the summoning of the First Slayer, it had been years since he'd been part of this kind of ritual, and in those days he'd been calling on beings far more dangerous, but oh, yes, the rush was still there, the feeling of being outside oneself, caught up in something vast. He poured out the libation of water at the cardinal points around the circle, calling on the proper powers at each one before swinging into the mind-numbing repetition of the _lapriyè. _ By the time it was over, eyes were beginning to glaze. Giles picked up the gourd rattle--no proper _ asson_, lacking the beads and snake bones, but it would do, would serve--and made a sweeping gesture over the vèvès, as if to fling aside a veil. "A l'Espirit surtout, royaume de Bon Dieu. Pour les Marasa, Jumeaux sacrés qui se refléctent de chaque côté di mirior." Water spilled clear and lovely from the lip of the bottle, the drops spattering the carefully drawn lines of cornmeal, but that was right and proper at this stage, and Giles felt no regret. All things passed in their time. "Ago! Ghede! Ago! Ghede! Ago! Ghede! Ago-é!"

Giles braced himself, took a mouthful of the peppered rum and spat it onto Ghede's vèvè; his mouth burned, but he scarcely noticed. Everyone except Xander shuffled into the center of the room to join the dance, and as they swirled round the ring of candles. Xander, still seated off to the side with the drum, was concentrating on keeping the beat, with no attention to spare for anything else. Willow and Tara stamped and swayed exuberantly, completely caught up in the rhythm of the ritual. Anya danced carefully, copying the steps he'd demonstrated earlier, as if she expected a test later. Buffy looked determined, and Spike looked embarrassed enough to combust on the spot, but this, Giles had made it very clear, was a participatory rite; there were no spectators. The drum rumbled on, counterpointing the slap and scuff of feet on concrete; each beat clear, very clear, each note distinct yet blending into an overarching framework of sound which permeated the room, the building, the world.

*****

_ Bugger this._

It wasn't that he didn't like dancing, because he did, and he was bloody well good at it, thank you very much, but that was _dancing_\--be it waltz or a foxtrot or free-form modern dance club writhing, the point was you were talking to someone, body to body, pure communication unsullied by words. Dancing was a primal shout--yeah, world, this is me! And this thing they were doing now, he didn't know what it was, but it was all about talking to something too big to listen, one with the hymns he'd suffered through in his youth, and what if there was a beat to it? The whole purpose was to sublimate the self, not express it.

Besides, how could he concentrate on some sodding ritual dance with the maddening scent of a Slayer on the rag in his nostrils? Blood and sweat and the hint of arousal, oh, more than a hint, she'd enjoyed their little dust-up every bit as much as he had and Christ he wanted to drag her away from this farce, spread those taut golden thighs and...

White.

He blinked, staggered. There was an illusion, when you stood on the platform at the back of a train while it pulled out of the station, that you were standing still and it was the world that was rushing away with ever-increasing speed, and it was like that now; everything was receding--well, why not, the universe was expanding at the speed of light... or something like that; what had he been thinking...? The drumbeat was a roaring in his inhumanly sensitive ears. His limbs froze, and he stumbled again. He was supposed to keep dancing. It was important. Giles had said so, and he respected old Rupert--didn't like him, of course, hello, vampire, and vampires don't like anyone and why the hell was he dancing again? And where was everything and everyone and who...

White.

*****

_Spike's gone._

Buffy whirled around in time to see Spike stumble and catch himself, breaking rhythm. Despite the fact that the familiar black-clad body was standing there right behind her, part of her remained absolutely convinced he was nowhere in... not sight, but whatever it was that told her he was here. Giles and the others broke ranks, piling up behind Spike. The drum faltered and fell silent as Xander realized that something had happened.

Spike, or whatever was inhabiting his body, looked at her and broke into a lascivious grin, tongue-tip dancing across sharp white teeth--Spike, but not-Spike. "It's you again!" she blurted out.

He bent over, and picked up the remains of the peppered rum, tossed it off and licked his lips. "You went and opened the door, ti-blanc," he said. It was Spike's voice, a touch more nasal than usual, but the intonations, the accent, were all wrong. "Why you so damned surprised when we walk through?" He stretched out one arm and examined it, twisting his hand back and forth so the muscles of his forearm rippled under the pale skin. "Fuck me, I got to get one of these. You smell good enough to eat, ma Cherie."

It had been bad enough when Tara had been the one ridden by the loa; this was somehow infinitely worse. An irrational and extremely pissed-off voice in the back of her head was screaming _Give him back, give him back, give him back!_ Buffy forcibly muffled it and pulled away as Giles stepped forward, the gourd rattle still clasped in his hand. "Papa Ghede," he said respectfully, "please accept the offerings we've brought, and favor us with your advice on the questions which trouble our minds."

"There's offerings and offerings." Not-Spike grinned at Buffy again and grabbed his crotch. "You found the cock you was chasing, no? You had your mouth full of that drumstick often enough, Cherie; how come you still so hungry?" Buffy clenched her teeth and felt her face heating up; was it kosher to give the god you'd just summoned a good punch in the nose? Not-Spike just laughed and dropped to the floor cross-legged, grabbed the chicken blood and the roast peanuts and began crunching them down happily. "Good stuff. I like the barbeque flavor better, just so you know. So what's so damn important to ask Papa Ghede?" he said with his mouth full.

Giles, somewhat nonplused at the informality of it all, squatted down beside the loa. "Well... I suppose the most important question is why are you here? I don't mean here specifically, or you specifically," he added hastily. "In the last week or two there's been an unusually high concentration of... well, for lack of a better term, emanations of the divine in and around Sunnydale. And yet we can find no prophecy to explain this--no apocalypses appear to be on the schedule. What does this mean?"

Ghede finished off the chicken blood and took a pull from the bottle of rum. "The world's out of balance. Someone's got too many players on the field, and the other side's gone and bitched to the ref. There's rules, ti-blanc. There's limits and bounds, and someone's been stepping over them." He shrugged. "Something gonna snap soon."

Before Giles could pose another question, Willow interrupted, her voice unwontedly shrill. "You mean the Balance, right? That it's gone out of whack? And we should all be doing anything we can to make sure the good guys win, right? Because last time, Acathla, Hell, cats and dogs living together--major badness!"

Bright blue eyes darted to the witch's face, knowing. "You think Light should win? You try getting to sleep when the sun never sets. You think Dark should win? You try eating bread when the corn don't grow! You can't have a world without day and night both. Both sides, they fight like kids on a see-saw, but we in the middle, we know. The seesaw don't work without a weight on both sides. So we come to watch where the big fight is, and maybe we put a thumb on the scales... or maybe not." He winked, a conspiratorial grin lighting his face.

Giles wrested back control of the conversation. "If the Balance is indeed being upset, what can we do to restore it?"

Ghede threw back his head and laughed. "Take the extra players off the field--or switch the team shirts!" He finished off the last of the peanuts and began tearing into the cornbread. Possession didn't appear to make much difference in Spike's appetite. "Who are these extra players?"

Those eyes came back to her, sparkling with amusement. "You see one every time you look in the mirror, Warrior of the People."

A thread of panic entered her voice. _ Did someone mention cosmic retribution?_ "You don't mean--"

"What I mean, I say. Now I'll answer the one you don't ask: Like calls to like, and opposites attract. Night and day make a world." He took a final swig of the rum and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Looks like you're out of peanuts, Cherie. Tell my horse he do okay for le mort ti-blanc."

Spike's face went slack and the blue eyes went white, rolling back in his head. The vampire collapsed, strings cut, and the bottle left his limp hand and clattered to the floor. Buffy dove for him, grabbing Spike's shoulders before his head could slam into the floor and pulling him upright again. He engaged in a brief struggle to sit up on his own, then melted woozily against Buffy, head cradled between her breasts. "What the bloody fuck...?" he croaked.

_Spike's back, Spike's back, Spike's back..._ Anyone else would have been gasping in agony at the amount of pressure her arms were exerting; Spike just grunted a little and burrowed into her shoulder. "You're not going to throw up, are you?" Buffy asked. It would have been a lot easier to sound casual and unworried if her voice hadn't kept cracking. "Because if you are, I'm dropping you, right now."

Half a bottle of eighty-proof rotgut was barely enough to make an impression on vampire physiology, and Spike was a far more hardened carouser than Tara anyway. "M'fine, love. Not gonna sick up." He showed no signs of wanting to get to his feet any time soon; the possession itself seemed to have taken considerable toll. He aimed a bloodshot glare at Giles. "I've got you in my book, Rupert--if you ever snooker me into another--"

"It was rather fascinating, wasn't it?" Giles was watching the two of them with an inscrutable expression. "I could have wished for more time..."

"Well?" Spike hadn't grown any patience in his encounter with divinity. "What's the skinny then? Who do we kill?"

Giles sat down on the pommel horse and began polishing his glasses. Buffy looked him. _Go on, say it_. Giles was always the one to say the necessary and unthinkable. But this time, all he did was drop his eyes and say nothing, nothing at all. Buffy's mouth tightened, and she hauled Spike to his feet. "I'm going to get him back to his crypt. Talk among yourselves."

*****

No sun penetrated the lower levels of the crypt, but there was always light. Splayed in the middle of the four-poster bed, Buffy was lapped in mellow candlelight. Her hair spilled golden over the pillows, her head arched back upon the rumpled sheets that smelled of cigarettes and him--of both of them, now. Spike lay cradled between her legs, as still as she save for the tiny, subtle movement of lips and tongue in the secret places of her body, millimeter strokings and sucklings, all that was needed to coax her to the crest of yet another melting rapture. He could have brought her to the peak simply by breathing on her; three, six, who-knew-how-many previous climaxes had left her whole body pliant beyond measure to his touch, held together only by breath and exquisitely sensitive skin. She had barely the energy to sigh as the warmth within her swelled up again and flooded out through all her limbs.

_Good girls don't sleep with vampires._

Spike's moan of delight segued into slurpy noises of the sort Dawn would doubtless have parlayed into a new jacket or three. At last he raised his head from between her thighs, licking his bloodstained lips with a dazed, glassy-eyed smile. "Nectar," he got out, his voice husky with satiety. "Nectar and sodding ambrosia. God, to think you've been going to waste for _years_... we've got a new rule from now on. Once a month we go to bed and don't get out for the next three days."

_Good girls don't fall in love with soulless monsters_. "Spike, you're disgusting."

"Yeh, and you love it." He pulled himself up the bed, elbow over elbow, her demon lover, terrible as an army with banners. His body was lean and taut-muscled as a racing greyhound's, arching over hers, hard for her again--perhaps Slayer's blood really was an aphrodisiac. He kissed her full on the mouth, and the taste of her own blood and come on his tongue was as rich and wild as pomegranates. His whispered endearments filled all the empty aching places of her heart, as his cock filled all the empty aching places of her body--so good, so full and whole she felt with him inside her! Spike moved within her, slow and sweet and gentle, fangs teasing her neck but never drawing blood--what need had he to steal what was freely given elsewhere? His beautiful face transfigured as they approached completion together: man to monster and back again, every aspect of him rapt in her.

In the ruddy glow of candlelight his shoulders were scored beneath her searching hands, marked with swiftly-healing crisscross welts from the times before which had not been so gentle. _Good girls don't bite and claw. Good girls are very careful never to break their boyfriends' bones or egos. Good girls save the world without wanting money for it._

"Love?" His hands cradled her face as her breath hitched and tears rose in her eyes, large, strong hands, hands which had slain their ten thousands. His arms encircled her shoulders, holding her as tenderly as a mother her child, while Buffy sobbed against his chest, as utterly abandoned in grief as she had been in love. "Shh, love, Buffy-sweet, it's all right..."

_ Good girls don't get turned on by sneaking out to kill things in the middle of the night. Good girls put duty above love, always. Good girls never, ever feel good about themselves._

"It's not!" She tore the words ragged from her throat; they didn't want to leave. "I have so much I need to do! I have to have the sex talk with Dawn. We have a tree now, I have to buy Christmas presents--I have t-to find a job, just in case! And I love you, I love you so much! I can't--I don't--I don't want to die! I don't want to die! Spike, I d-don't w-w-want to--"

"Then you won't!" Inhumanly strong fingers tightened on her shoulders, candlelight flared and danced in inhuman golden eyes and limned the serrated lines of bared fangs. Her beautiful monster, who had so much man in him. "I won't let it happen. I'll be dust before I let a one of them lay a finger on you or the Bit." Her Spike, who would live for her, die for her, kill for her, whom no really good girl would allow herself to love for precisely that reason.

_So you can't be a good girl, can you?_

"Will you stop me, then, if I have to jump again to make things right?" Spike's eyes dropped, unable to meet hers. And she, stupid girl, had thought the worst she'd have to face was the prospect of Spike killing someone else. "You know what it said. Tara said it was always right--" She pressed her face into his chest, feeling the cool firm muscle contract and shift beneath her cheek. "It can't just be that there's two Slayers, there's been two Slayers for years. I came back wrong. That's the only explanation. I came back wrong, and--"

"Bollocks." Spike sat up, pulling her with him, stroking her hair as she had used to stroke Dawn's when Dawn had had a nightmare. "I'd know if you weren't Buffy. I'd know. There's something else, and we'll find it. Go home. Check on Dawn. Change for Anya's party. You'll feel better." He ran the pad of his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the tears, and his voice grew light and teasing. "Hell, pet, worse comes to worst I'll turn you. You'll have switched sides. End of problem."

She punched his arm, and said "Asshole," with the inflection that meant 'I love you.' _Don't you get it, Spike? I'm afraid that I already have._


	22. Chapter 22

"I don't want you to go," Anya said. She was standing behind him in the bedroom, fussing with his collar, and Xander pulled her hand away for the third time. Normally he liked her to fuss a little--engage in the mutual grooming ritual, she called it, more to tease him than out of cultural cluelessness these days. Tonight her attentiveness bothered him and he shivered her hands away like a horse twitching flies from its skin.

Patience, always with Anya the patience. "Ahn," he replied, tugging his coat from its hook in the closet, "It's your shower. I'm not gonna hang around and mess that up for you." The living room was filling up with biddies of all ages and several species, and a Sunday night which could have been profitably spent curled up together on the couch watching bad movies and throwing popcorn at the TV screen was already irretrievably lost.

Anya didn't pout; she never pouted. She just looked at him in that confused-but-eager way she had, trying to understand his Earth logic. "But it's a party where all my friends give me presents and wish me well. You're my best friend, Xander. Of course you're invited. And you don't even have to give me a present."

"Girlfriends. Friends who are girls." He indicated himself with a flourish. "Me, not a girl. I thought we'd gone over this."

She sat down on the edge of the bed, radiant in red (though God, he hoped she'd tire of the platinum hair soon; it reminded him far too much of someone he'd far rather kick than kiss). Her face wore that pinched unattractive frown which had been more and more in evidence lately. Wedding stress, wedding stress--but if the arrival of Halfrek and the rest of her demon pals had cheered Anya, it hadn't helped relieve him. He'd listened to them chattering in the kitchen while Anya made dinner, stirring up memories of the good old days of slaughter and destruction along with the tuna casserole. Sometimes he had the uncomfortable feeling that Anya's beauty really was just skin-deep, that at any moment sharp teeth would slice through it from below and the Anya-skin would fall away, leaving... something unpleasant, that was for sure. _Xander Harris, demon magnet._ Because of course no normal human female could sustain a long-term relationship with the likes of him.

He shook the thought away. Anya tried to be normal. She put a great deal of effort into being normal, but never seemed to realize the source of his nerves was the fact that she did have to put effort into it. Now she was watching him again, trying to gauge his mood from the set of his shoulders. "Sexual segregation at entertainment functions is an antiquated custom. I don't see why we can't have an up-to-date relationship."

Xander ground his teeth and rattled the hangers on the clothes rack so as to have an excuse not to turn around. "Is that what Halfrek says about it?"

"No. It's a valuable networking opportunity, and besides that, we have Vienna sausages, which I know you like. Why do you keep bringing up Halfrek? You're not--do you find her more attractive than me?" Anya gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth. "She been flirting with you, hasn't she? I knew it! She's always been the beauty! It's like when she stole that Grud demon all over again! 'Oh, you're pretty, Anyanka, but Halfrek, she's stunning!' And I happen to know she's had work done on her facial veins--you can bank on it, they're not that perfectly defined naturally!"

Why was it that women invariably picked romantic rivals as maids of honor? Some feminine pack ranking thing, maybe, the alpha female depriving the rest of the right to breed? Xander abandoned the pointless re-arrangement of his shirts and walked over to the bed, where he sat down and put an arm around her shoulders. "No, of course not."

Anya sniffled and laid her head on his shoulder, letting him play with her hair. "You just don't realize the animal attraction you exude. It's pheromones, I'm sure of it; it drives women mad. I've seen them looking at you. Especially Willow. Honestly, Xander, you drove the poor girl to lesbianism to try to escape her hopeless passion for you." She searched his face for traces of residual Willow-lust, anxious. "It is hopeless, isn't it?"

"Anya, honey, sweetheart, darling, you're making me insane." Xander caught up her wringing hands in his and stilled them. "I lust after neither Willow nor Halfrek. I love you. You're gorgeous. And I'm going out on patrol. Spike says there's a Krallock demon on the loose, and we're gonna take it down."

She caught at his sleeve, limpid brown eyes full of nameless fears. "A Krallock demon? Do you have to? Do you realize they can bite through pig iron? If you absolutely can't stay here, why not go to a movie or participate in something that won't result in bodily injury and reduced work hours? It's a Sunday night!"

More patience. Heaping bucketfuls of patience. Anya, after all, came from a long line of demons who sensibly abandoned ship when an apocalypse rolled into town, and he came from a long line of people who were only passingly acquainted with the concept of 'sensible.' "I know. But Buffy and Willow and Tara are all coming to _your_ shower, they being of the girl persuasion, and someone's got to patrol--"

"For one night, don't you think--"

Patience go bye-bye. "That we can just let people be eaten for a change?" he snapped. Anya flinched away, face crumbling around her wounded eyes, and he immediately felt like a heel.

"I didn't mean--"

He hated feeling like a heel. "Yeah, that's the problem!" What exactly did that mean? Oh, well, it sounded good. Forget reason and logic and all the nights they'd blown off patrol to go to the Bronze or study or whatever; tonight Buffy was counting on him. More or less. Xander stormed out into the living room, coat flapping behind him. The effectiveness of his exit was somewhat marred by having to maneuver around a string of middle-aged businesswomen engaged in trying to pass an orange from one end of the line to the other without using their hands, but as exits went, it was one of his better ones.

*****

Willow was wearing the dead Muppet top--sleeveless, bright red, and very, very fuzzy. Buffy was secretly positive that that top was a sign of the coming apocalypse--if not this one, then another one down the line somewhere, involving large toothless furry things gumming them all to death while reciting the alphabet. Its appearance always signified Willow in one of her insanely positive moods, which generally coincided with one of Buffy's 'life sucks dead rats through a garden hose' moods. Buffy gazed forlornly at the small gold-wrapped package in her hands. It was beautiful--red velvet ribbon and professionally crisp store wrapping paper in an abstract pattern of silver and gold bells that didn't look too obviously Christmas-y... and no acts of hideous evil required. All she'd had to do was change the tags. Out goes the 'To Buffy From Dad,' in comes the 'To Anya from Buffy,' and ta-da, shower present. _Wah_.

Tara patted her shoulder. "Be strong. You're doing the right thing."

"I don't want to do the right thing. I want my new Discman." Weirdly enough, after bawling on Spike's shoulder, she'd gone home, showered, changed, had another argument with Dawn about her grounding, and, as he'd predicted, felt better. In theory she knew that a good cry and a wash-up afterwards were restoratives, but she'd been sure that kind of emotional resiliency had abandoned her back in the age of dinosaurs. A large part of her relative peace of mind, she suspected, hinged on the fact that she already knew the solution to this problem, however little she wanted to accept it right now. Or maybe she was finally learning to harness the awesome power of Summers' denial for good rather than evil.

If, of course, her best friend would ever drop the subject. "Me, I think Giles is all over-reacty," Willow said, dispensing seasonal good cheer and blind optimism. "For all we know? This 'leave the playing field' biz could be a _good_ thing. It could mean 'Buffy gets to retire from the slaying and have the normal life she's always wanted, yay!' And it said you're _one_ of these extra players which means that there's others and if we find them then we can--"

"Rub them out for the good of humanity?" Buffy asked, extra-perky.

"We could at least find out why the extras are extra." Willow was not to be deterred by inappropriate humor. "And you could try the retirement option and see what happens. I mean, you're supposed to be on strike anyway, right? Instead of making a secret identity for your secret identity, you just quit for real for awhile."

"Maybe you've got a point, Wills--several simultaneous points--but we've never had much luck relying on kinder, gentler interpretations of prophesy." She'd been haunted by the specter of an ordinary life for so long--she'd matched wills with Giles for it, fought the Watcher's Council for it, held on to Riley like a life raft for the prospect of it. She'd thought that the trip to L.A. had finally exorcized it. Now it rose from its grave once more, ranting about how it would have succeeded if it weren't for those meddling kids. What exactly did she mean by a normal life, anyway? Starring in the Ice Capades and/or marrying Christian Slater wasn't really an option at this stage.

They checked the building number as they approached the nearest block of apartments--they'd been here a hundred times, but the complex was one of those cookie-cutter places where every unit looked much the same as every other unit, and it wouldn't be the first of those hundred times that they'd ended up making embarrassed apologies to some retired couple from Minnesota. The three of them crowded onto the landing and Tara knocked; there was no response. "Can they hear us?" she asked, leaning over to peer in the window. The drapes were drawn, and a bass thumpa-thumpa-thumpa made the porch railings vibrate slightly.

Buffy bounced up and down on her toes, trying to see through the window over Tara's shoulder. "Thing is, I've tried quitting before, remember? I can't just turn the Slayer powers off. Weirdness follows me around and waves its tentacles in my face yelling 'lookie, lookie!'" A familiar tingle chased up her spine and down again. "Speaking of which..." She turned, and there he was, the epitome of her non-normal life: Spike, strolling up the walk behind them, a moving shadow in the gathering dusk, slicked-back, bone-colored waves of hair licked with the faintest tinge of gold in the last of the evening light. He had a bulky unfamiliar object slung over one shoulder, and as he got closer she recognized it as the tranquilizer gun he'd taken from Bryce's men at Halloween. Trust Spike to keep track of the cool toys.

"Hey." She waved Anya's present at him. "You're right. Having a conscience is highly overrated. Turn me now so I won't have to give this up." _I can joke about this. Healthy sign of emotional distance or flashing neon 'Go directly to Hell, do not pass Go?'_

Spike stopped on the step below her. In the amber glow of the porch light the corners of his eyes were crinkled in amusement and a pious smirk quirked his lips. "Sorry, love, but your stunning example's completely reformed me. Wouldn't interfere with your sacrifice for the world."

"Curses." Buffy slipped her arms around his waist and leaned into him as if they hadn't spent half the afternoon shagging like mad things. They flowed together like quicksliver, her head butting against his chest, her hands gliding up the small of his back. Muscle rolled beneath her hands as he shifted the weight of the trank gun. Very touchable, Spike, very tasteable. Blood and smoke on her tongue, complex leather-whiskey-earth scent in her nose and rumbly happy-vampire noises vibrating in her ear; a workout for all five senses. She could spend a year learning the exact proportions of his mouth by heart, charting the curve of his lower lip, the precise angle of the divot in his upper lip as the cool supple flesh grew warm beneath her own.

She pulled away and nodded at the gun. "Don't tell me, let me guess. You were invited to the shower, and decided Anya really needed something to keep Xander from straying out of the game preserve."

Spike snorted. "Some of us have patrol tonight, Slayer Chavez." He looked at Willow. "Got 'em?"

Willow gave him a tolerant smile; _ Laymen!_ it said. "Quality spellcasting," she said, "Takes time. They have to soak for another couple of hours. I'll zing 'em them over to you after the shower."

"Fat lot of good that'll do us if the blighter decides to show ahead of schedule," Spike grumbled. "Krallock demon," he added by way of explanation to Buffy. "We're off to track it down its lair as soon as I extract Harris from the hen party. They're tough bastards. Red said she could add a little extra mojo to the darts."

Willow made a 'pfft' noise and waved his complaint away, unfazed. "A little! Ho ho. This is no weenie little sleep spell. Au contraire! One poke from these puppies will knock your beastie into next week." She made an illustrative jab at the air.

Tara looked askance at Willow. "When did you agree to...?"

"Last night? When you guys were trimming the tree with Dawn? And this morning, did you not notice the nasty green bubbly thing on the left rear burner?" Willow sounded the tiniest bit exasperated. "I told you, the magic's back. I didn't realize I needed to clear every spell I do with you."

"Of course not--it's just... I mean..."

Tara was looking flustered in the extreme, and Buffy intervened. "Isn't it a little soon to be making with the big magic? Tomorrow, big spell-casting night, with us needing a well-rested, chipper Willow. It's not that we don't trust you, Wills, but two days ago you were wearing yourself out lighting your candle, and now you're burning it at both ends."

Willow folded pale arms across her fuzzy red torso, eyes scrunched and lower lip protruding. Her good cheer was beginning to acquire a sullen edge. "I told you, not a problem. If you don't want to believe me, fine."

Spike kissed the top of Buffy's head and murmured in a perfectly neutral voice, "Red knows her own limits best, eh?" To Buffy he added, "Be a love and don't kill our little pal if you happen to run across it before midnight, hey? Or at least, don't let anyone see you kill it? I've got money riding on this."

Buffy covered her ears in a hear-no-evil pose. "I am shocked, shocked I tell you! As long as it's not kittens, I'll try to restrain my killer instincts. It would help if I had some idea what a Krallock demon looked like."

"Christ, Slayer, what do they teach you in these schools? Nine foot tall, claws as long as your arm, all over seaweed and barnacles, smells like the Thames at low tide..."

Tara was knocking on the door again, to no apparent effect. Spike made an impatient noise, brushed by Tara and hammered a fist on the apartment door till it shook on its hinges. The porch-shaking backbeat cut off, the door flew open, and from within the apartment a gale of shrill feminine laughter added several degrees of wind chill to the nippy evening.

A tall, statuesque woman in a cream linen suit dress stood in the entryway. She could have just stepped out of a cameo; she had a smooth oval face with regular features and large, fine dark eyes. A mass of dark russet hair was piled atop her head, spilling down her neck in a waterfall of ringlets, and a large, rather gaudy gold-and-ruby pendant which didn't match the rest of her tasteful attire in the least was displayed prominently upon her bosom. This must be Anya's maid of honor, in human guise for the moment--Anya'd mentioned she was another vengeance demon. The stone had a fire that drew the eye, and Buffy found herself making calculations as to how quickly she could grab and crush it if the need arose.

"You must be Xander's friends. Come on in, all of you," the woman said. Her tone and expression conveyed politely unexpressed curiosity as to why Xander's friends would be intruding upon Anya's wedding shower. Buffy's finely honed bitch-detection alarms gave a warning buzz. "I'm Halfrek. Please call me Hallie."

Tara mustered a polite smile, and Willow looked at Halfrek curiously - Willow'd come within a hair of being a colleague, after all. Halfrek stepped back and held the door open. The spotless apartment beyond was festooned with streamers in blue and white and full of people. Considering the usual state of Xander's apartment when he'd been living alone, it gave one a real respect for Anya's talent for organization.

Willow and Tara filed inside. Buffy hooked her fingers through Spike's and breezed after them, to be brought up short when Spike remained rooted to the spot, staring at Halfrek. Had he never been invited in? She'd gotten the idea that over the summer Spike had gotten in fairly tight with the rest of the gang, but if anyone was likely to leave him uninvited, it was Xander... She looked over her shoulder, questioning. "Spike? Do you need an entry visa?"

"Eh?" Spike had the pole-axed look of a man running into a girl he'd loved or hated in high school at the ten-year reunion. He returned to earth with a shake and stepped across the threshold, still staring at Hallie's back as she made for the living room, shooing Tara and Willow before her. His head was cocked to one side in puzzlement. "Sorry, love, thought I saw a ghost."

"William?" Halfrek asked, turning about, fine large eyes even larger with shock at the sound of his voice. Her hand went to her bosom, (which did, to Buffy's intense interest, actually heave) covering her pendant in a curiously old-fashioned gesture. "Oh, my stars. It is William! Why aren't you dead?"

"Cecily?" For a second Spike's face was naked--not just open, but stripped, peeled bare to expose some quivering inner pith of emotion never intended to bear the sting of open air. Then he straightened, visibly pulling the Big Bad cloak around his shoulders--head cocked insolently back, eyes hooded, one thumb hooked into his belt--a veritable Cherynobl of danger and sex appeal. "I go by Spike these days, and as it happens, I am dead."

Was there a vibe here? Buffy looked from one face to the other. _Oh, we have an entire Moog synthesizer's worth of vibes. I do not like her, Sam I Am._

Spike looked Halfrek up and down, nostrils flaring. "You took up a new profession after the news about Harding got round?"

"Heavens no. I'd been in the vengeance business for ages before we met. D'Hoffryn took me on right after--" A look crossed Halfrek's face, as at a memory which should have been haunting, but which time and distance had rendered meaningless. "Oh. My. Roger... So that was you." Her voice sharpened. "You didn't go after me. Not that a mere vampire could--"

A slow and unpleasant smile stretched across his face, and Spike's canines extended for a second. "Professional courtesy, Miss Addams."

Buffy was beginning to feel as if she were witnessing some kind of emotional tennis match. _Halfrek lobs a funny look into the net, and Spike responds with a backhanded compliment! Fifteen all!_ "Excuse me," she said, waving a hand. "Did someone forget to pass out the scorecards?"

Spike was immediately contrite. "Sorry, love. Bit of a shock. This is--was--Cecily Addams. We were acquainted, back in London..." He hesitated. "Before I was turned. Halfrek, this is my girl." He gave 'my girl' a defiant emphasis, as if he feared Halfrek might miss the point. "Buffy Summers, the Slayer."

Buffy smiled very sweetly and tucked a hand around Spike's arm, suppressing an urge to take a leaf from his book and growl at her rival. _My vampire. You cannot have him on a boat, you cannot have him in the coat_.

Xander appeared out of the mob of women in the living room, shrugging into his regrettable brown coat. Buffy had always had high hopes of it being shredded by something with big teeth and a taste for Naugahyde, but so far nothing had obliged her. Xander looked none too pleased with life, but he didn't give any of them a chance to ask questions. "What's up, Spike? Old girlfriend?"

Spike and Halfrek said "Not by half," and "Hardly," in frosty unison.

Xander's eyebrows went up. "Well, excuse me for engaging in banter without a license. You ready to rock, Spike?"

"Yeh." He tossed Xander the tranquilizer gun with a little more force than necessary. "Will's not gonna deliver the goods till later, so if we meet up with anything before then you'll have to beat it to death with the stock." Spike considered this. "The night's looking up."

Xander shouldered the trank gun and headed for the door. Spike turned to follow; on impulse, Buffy caught hold of his duster and tugged him back. "Hey, you. I need my recommended daily allowance of Spikey goodness before you go."

Something chilly thawed in his eyes, and the small cold doubt which had started to crystallize in her own gut melted as she felt one of those deep growly laughs go through him. "Well, we'll have to do something about that, Slayer. Can't have you going all weak-kneed, can we?"

With an inscrutable look in Halfrek's direction, Spike bent to kiss her, and mmmmmm, _good_. In the midst of being ten dollars and fifty-two cents shy of dead broke and Giles leaving and cryptic loas and crazy wizards there was Spike kissage, and it was very, very good, deep, slow, caressing tongue stroking tongue while Xander made gagging noises unheeded in the background and Spike's strong hand slid down from the small of her back to grab her ass and heave her upright and damned if her knees hadn't gone out on her there for a second. "You'll pay for this," she whispered into his ear, and Spike gave her a wicked leer.

"Can't wait." And he and Xander were out the door and gone.

Buffy straightened her blouse, wiped the silly grin off her face, and turned to face Halfrek. "So," she said brightly. "There's cake?"

*****

The whole thing was Spike's fault, of course. Xander wasn't sure exactly why or how, but if you traced the connections back properly, everything was Spike's fault. If he hadn't mentioned the stupid Krallock demon, maybe Xander would have taken Anya's advice to go see a movie, and the bed waiting for him when he returned wouldn't be the living room couch, and they wouldn't be lost in the Sunnydale sewer system.

Not that Spike was admitting to having led them astray. The author of their predicament stood in the middle of the crossroads--or more accurately, the cross-tunnel--half-smoked cigarette askew in one corner of his mouth, his lean face sporting the tight-lipped scowl which usually presaged someone or something getting smashed into very small pieces. The tunnels remained blank and uninformative: each one perfectly straight, faced with ancient tile which had once been white but was now a dingy cream where it wasn't mottled with stains from rust or mold. Mysterious pipes and cables snaked along the walls, their color-coded insulation slowly flaking away into powder. Every twenty feet or so a ceiling panel provided feeble greenish light. The ceiling was just low enough to make Xander feel like ducking constantly.

Xander set the tranquilizer gun down, one hand straying to the pocket of his coat where the ordinary, un-magical darts nestled. "Look, I know it's against Guy Rule #147, but I think it's time to accept that we're lost."

Spike removed his cigarette and snarled, "We are not bloody lost!" He whirled around, duster flaring, and stalked ten or twelve paces back the way they'd come. His fingers clenched on the haft of the axe with which he'd supplemented their trank gun, and his pale angry eyes flicked from side to side, examining the featureless tile of walls and ceiling. "I bloody well live down here, in case you've forgotten. I know these tunnels like the back of my hand--most of these tunnels--the ones near the crypt, anyway--and this intersection shouldn't be here. This tunnel's supposed to take a jog left here and run into the main sewer line for Wilkins Boulevard fifty feet further along."

Xander folded his arms and leaned against the nearest bundle of mystery cables. "Well, it doesn't. So we can either wander like Charlie on the MTA until we get completely lost, fall down a pit, and starve to death--"

"I wouldn't count on you living that long," Spike muttered.

"--or we can admit we're slightly lost, backtrack, take the right tunnel, and those of us with steady jobs might possibly get home in time to snatch six hours of sleep before having to be at the site tomorrow morning. I know which option I'm going for."

Spike glowered for a minute, the muscles in his jaw working. Somewhere in the distance, water started dripping, marking time. Very deliberately, Spike took the cigarette butt from his lips and ground it out against the white-tiled wall, leaving a grey-black smudge. He tossed the butt aside, shouldered the axe and set off without a word. Xander followed with a sense of relief; it was never certain when Spike's penchant for reckless stupidity would kick in, and he couldn't help feeling they'd just backed away from the ledge over the bottomless pit.

He trudged down the corridor in Spike's wake, hands shoved into his coat pockets. His thumbs still ached from last week's adventures, though the bandage level had subsided and he had most of his range of motion back. Anya was right, as she was with annoying frequency. He never should have volunteered for slaying duty on a work night. He'd already received one warning about clocking in late--just a friendly heads-up from Tony, the job superintendent, who liked his work. The next warning wasn't going to be so friendly, and might go on his record. He couldn't blame Tony; there was no room on a construction site for a worker who continually showed up late or sleepy or with mysterious injuries that interfered with his work. It was dangerous, not just for him but for everyone he worked with: power tools, heavy machinery, and heights were just as potentially deadly as vampires when handled carelessly. And around every job site, clustered in every Home Depot parking lot, were the dark-eyed, watchful men--the guys without jobs, men who'd take over his spot in a hot second the minute the job superintendent gave the word. Construction jobs were at a premium, and construction workers were expendable. Hell, at any minute he could get laid off just because some banker backed out and the next project failed to materialize.

Buffy had to fit whatever job she took around her slaying; it was beginning to look as if he was going to have to give serious thought to fitting slaying around his job. And that stank. There were thousands of construction workers, and only a handful of vampire hunters. It was what he did after hours that made his life worth something to the world, wasn't it? Any schmoe could slap together a condominium; how many could say they'd helped blow away the Judge with a bazooka? But God, Anya wanted kids. How could he possibly--

"Bugger."

He almost ran nose-first into the back of Spike's head. The vampire had come to an abrupt halt; they were at another four-way intersection, exactly the same as the one they'd just left. Xander looked around uneasily. "I don't remember this."

"That's because it wasn't there."

"That's impossible. We must have gotten turned around at that first intersection--all those tunnels did look alike. We just went down the wrong one, and this is--"

Spike gave him the 'Exactly how stupid are you, anyway?' look and pointed to the wall without a word. There at shoulder height on the grimy tile was a black smudge, as if someone had ground out a cigarette butt against the wall.

*****

There was cake. There was also the ubiquitous veggie-and-dip platter which Buffy suspected of traveling from party to party under its own power, accompanied by its partner in crime, the cheese and cracker assortment. Drinks included a surfeit of wine coolers in flavor combinations never seen in nature, and fruit punch which proved to have been liberally dosed with cayenne pepper--Anya had, apparently, been stricken with this culinary inspiration after the summoning ritual.

Buffy batted aside a cluster of crepe paper wedding bells and began the challenging task of assembling a crack team of hors d'oeuvres on a dangerously bendy paper plate. Between the ritual, two hours of workout, and two or three hours of... other workout, she was starving. As she contemplated the optimal placement of broccoli florets, Willow popped up beside her, earlier grouchiness evaporated. "We timed it just right! The humiliating party games just finished." Willow gazed around. "I didn't know Anya knew all these people. Wow."

"Yeah, how dare she have a social life when we have none?" There were a dozen or so women present, two or three of whom seemed to be friends of Anya's from her vengeance demon days, and the rest of whom, Buffy guessed, were people Anya knew professionally. She recognized one or two faces as regular customers at the Magic Box. Tara surfaced briefly, conversing with someone from her old Wicca group, before she was sucked up into the crowd once more. Exhibit A, the Normal Life. Buffy tried to imagine herself among them, and wondered if this was what had driven Angel to lurking.

"We're cool," Willow assured her. "I know lots of people at school, honest. I even have lunch with them sometimes. I verge upon verging upon popular."

"True. And I spoke to the counter guy at Albertsons when I picked up milk. Plus, I have an excuse. I've been dead. It cuts down on your opportunities to meet and greet." Buffy stood on tiptoe and tried to get an idea of the lay of the land. Strategy. "Food promotes happy mingling. You get drinks, I'll get you a plate."

Willow saluted and made a break for the kitchen, where the ice chest was located. Buffy shifted her own plate to a position of precarious balance on her forearm and started loading up a second plate for Willow. As she tried to remember whether Willow liked cauliflower or not, and if guessing wrong was likely to trigger another sulk, Halfrek's voice emerged from the background babble for a second, low and mildly scandalized. She was talking to one of the other vengeance demons. "...dating a _vampire_, can you believe it?"

The second vengeance demon put shocked fingers to her lips. "No!"

"Declassé, isn't it?" Halfrek looked down her lovely nose. "But then, it's not as though Slayers are anything but mongrels themselves..."

Buffy was saved from the faux pas of punching the maid of honor's teeth in by the bride-to-be, who appeared out of nowhere bearing more canapes. "Buffy, you made it!" Anya bubbled, blocking her escape route. "I really thought you'd pretend you needed to kill things tonight and not come."

"Never crossed my mind," Buffy lied. Anya looked so grateful, and she'd come this close to forgetting about the party altogether, and closer to arriving sans gift. _Bad, inconsiderate Buffy_. She really ought to make more of an effort to make friends with Anya, if only Anya weren't so... Anya. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world."

Anya's eyes lit up. "I wanted to ask if you'd like to be one of my bridesmaids. I would have asked before, but you were dead, and it seemed pointless."

"I--um. It must be a pain to change the plans so close to the wedding."

"Oh, it is." Anya gave her a brilliant smile. "But you're a friend, and one's supposed to inconvenience oneself for friends. Hallie!" she cried, propelling Buffy over to the little coterie of women seated around the coffee table, poring over catalogs of flower arrangements and gowns. "She said yes! You've met Hallie--Buffy, this is Netta. I used to work with her." Anya winked violently at the word 'work.' "And Sandra Murchison and Lorri Collins, Lorri works for one of our biggest suppliers..."

Buffy scrabbled up a cheery smile for the four pairs of inquisitive eyes, human and otherwise, which fastened on her and the two heaping plates of food she was carrying. _Hello, everyone, this is my friend with the binge eating disorder. _ She hurriedly divested herself of Willow's plate and sat down, attempting to take up the smallest possible space on the couch.

"So pleased to meet you--Buffy, is it?" Sandra extended a hand and clasped Buffy's in a vigorous shake. "Hi. I'm Max's wife--I don't know if you've met him; he used to be on Xander's construction crew? Though I'm confused--Anya, I could have sworn you told us that Buffy was the friend who passed on last May!"

Buffy's brain threw a rod and froze. "It was more a..."

Anya bounced up and down, alight with enthusiasm and in no mood to let a little thing like death and resurrection interfere with the celebration of her nuptials. "She was. Show her the dresses!"

Was there a glint of malicious enjoyment in Halfrek's eyes as she passed the appropriate catalog over? Buffy went rigid with horror as she took in the full glory of the dress in the photograph. She swallowed. Maybe Willow could pull it off, considering some of the things Willow'd worn with a willing heart. Besides, Willow was a redhead. Redheads looked good in green. Bottle blondes looked like something fished up out of the estuary at low tide in green, but she was strong, she could take it. Except for the ruffles, no sane human being could take those ruffles, and--

She looked up, stared right into Anya's bright, hopeful eyes, and said, "It's gorgeous."

A cold bottle, still dripping ice water, appeared in her hand. Literally. Buffy almost dropped it in her lap. "Kiwi-strawberry." Willow draped herself over the back of the couch beside her and gestured; her plate of hors d'oeuvres left the coffee table and floated serenely across the intervening distance; Buffy opened her mouth to say something about not freaking the mundanes, but by that time Willow had the plate on the back of the couch and was nibbling on a Ritz. "It's all they had left," Willow said, waving her own bottle. "I see you've been introduced to the Attack of the Asparagus People." Buffy took a swallow of kiwi-strawberry and felt her mouth implode as the cloyingly sweet liquid hit the back of her throat. The wearer of the Elmo skin really had no call to cast stones, and besides, Willow was Xander's best man and would probably get to wear a nice butchy tux or something while she was trapped in this--this--

"Drink up," Sandra whispered. "We're going to need all the courage we can get to wear those dresses in public."

With a wary glance at Anya, who was chattering at Netta about the correct placement of the hideous cabbage rose corsages, Buffy whispered, "Didn't anyone try to talk her out of--?"

Sandra snorted and took a swallow of her own drink. "You don't want to know what we talked her out of, believe me. There were insects involved."

"I renounce curiosity." Conversation. She was having a conversation with a normal person--no need to panic; once upon a time she'd spoken to normal people on a regular basis. Sandra looked to be thirty-five, maybe, plumpish, with short poofy blonde hair every bit as natural as Buffy's and a wicked glint hiding in her mild brown eyes. _Give up the slaying and this could be me in ten or fifteen years--husband, two point five kids, white picket fence. A rewarding career by day, PTA meetings by night! Look, in the SUV, it's Supermom!_ "So... your husband works with Xander?"

A shadow crossed Sandra's face. "Used to. There was an accident last year. He's in a wheelchair. He works in the contractor's office now."

"Oh." _And of all possible subjects, Buffy Summers picks..._ "I'm so sorry to hear that."

Sandra shrugged. "We deal. It's not easy, but sometimes I think that if I didn't have a fight on my hands I think I'd get bored."

Buffy swirled the watermelon-colored liquid around in its bottle, took another sip and unpuckered her lips. "I can relate, I guess. At least my boyfriend's the _ walking_ dead." Sandra gave her an odd look and Buffy amended, "Uh, when he first gets up. Spike's not a morning person."

Halfrek stood and announced that they were going to start opening presents now. The there was a general whoop of approval and the guests gathered round the couch as Netta began ferrying presents over to the coffee table for Anya to rip open and exclaim over. As they turned to watch the celebration of capitalism at its finest, Willow took a swig of her own drink and nudged Buffy's shoulder with an elbow. "Spike rates the B-word now?" she asked with a teasing grin.

"I should hope so, considering his performance in the foyer," Halfrek said with an arch lift of one perfectly manicured brow which managed to convey that either way, said performance had been incredibly gauche.

Boyfriend was so completely the wrong word for Spike, all wholesome and malt-shoppy, but until she could think of something fitter for public consumption than 'demon lover'... Buffy gave Halfrek a smile as poisonously sweet as the wine cooler. "Spike's... mine." She did her own swoopy-eyebrow thing, matching Halfrek arch for arch. "So--you knew him when he was--" Mindful of Sandra's curious presence, she switched tracks from 'The notorious William the Bloody' to "--younger? Did you go to the prom together?"

Halfrek burst into peals of laughter. Lovely, chiming laughter. Buffy decided that she really, truly hated her. "We were acquainted socially. William, I suppose, would describe us as intimate friends. He does have a tendency to embroider, doesn't he?"

"I wouldn't know," Buffy said, all innocence. In fact, Spike had told her quite a lot about his past; the problem was, she had no idea how much of it was embroidery and how much cloth. In that grilling she'd given him last year, he'd dropped all kinds of vainglorious hints, making out that he'd been a rebel from the cradle on, with a trail of broken hearts and broken heads a mile wide and a continent long by the time Drusilla had been smitten by his rugged good looks and devilish charm. If William the Bloody had been a nineteeth-century gangster, would that make the former Cecily Addams some kind of Victorian moll? But that story didn't match up with other bits and pieces he'd let fall in less guarded moments, and she'd been warming to the idea of coaxing him out of himself little by little.

Now, confronted with a possible wellspring of information, she felt a perverse sense that this was cheating. _ Spike had pneumonia when he was twelve, and his mother gave him poetry books, and it's a good bet his birthday is May 21. Or William's birthday was. Whatever. I found that out with my very own investigative brilliance, Miss Tattletale Addams._

Halfrek settled comfortably, folding her hands demurely on her lap. "It wasn't simply the fact that I was in vengeance that made it impossible--he didn't know anything about my career, poor naive dear. I grant his family was respectable enough..."

*****

"Home sweet home," Xander muttered as they trudged into the intersection for the seventh or eighth time. It didn't seem to matter which of the four branches they chose to follow. They'd tried each tunnel in turn. They'd tried splitting up and going down two tunnels at once. They'd tried walking backwards. They'd tried looking for trap doors and secret buttons. They'd tried everything but leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, and every single attempt led right back to their starting point.

Xander collapsed, back against the wall, and slid to the ground, laying the tranquilizer gun across his knees. Spike stared around at the four identical tunnels leading off in for identically useless directions, perfectly expressionless; then a snarl of rage contorted his face and he whipped the axe off his shoulder and swung at the nearest wall. "Bloody, fucking... rrrrarrggh!" Tile shattered under the force of the blow and a rain of dust and knife-edged ceramic shards clattered to the floor. Spike stood in the wreckage, golden-eyed with frustration and breathing in short angry snorts. Then he heaved a sigh, propped his axe up in the nearest corner, and slumped down against the wall opposite Xander.

Xander glanced at his watch. The liquid crystal display was a featureless silver-grey. He frowned and shook his wrist to no effect. He'd just put in a new battery last month. "How long have we been down here?"

Spike grunted. "Does it matter?" Anger still simmered in his eyes, little golden flecks boiling up out of the blue. "Stupid bint," he muttered. "Probably telling the Slayer tales out of school right this minute. Doesn't know when she's got it good. Could've killed her then if I'd taken the fancy to. Could kill her now if I could get her bloody pendant; she seems to forget she's a sodding demon--"

"Spike, what the hell are you talking about?"

"Bloody Cecily bloody Addams is what I'm talking about!" Spike leaped to his feet and began tiger-pacing back and forth. "Your Halfrek. Woman's a bleeding menace. Not as if I wasn't going to tell Buffy eventually, but the time's got to be right for a thing like that. You don't just go blurting out your entire history to a bird on the first date." He twitched a sneer in Xander's direction. "Or maybe you do, not having any history to speak of, but--"

"Whoa, not _my_ Halfrek. You want her, you can keep her. Anya's got some insane idea that I'm hot for her." Where the hell had that come from, anyway? He'd _ seen_ what Halfrek looked like in her true shape, and had been trying to avoid thinking about Anya's having once looked the same ever since. Even if the thought of falling for the veiny and terrifying Halfrek wasn't absurd, where did Anya get the notion he'd prefer anyone to her?

"Not that daft an idea for her to get, is it?" Spike retorted. "You're not exactly throwing yourself into the nuptial frenzy."

"Look, I just wanted to go to a JP and get it over with!" Xander snapped back. One of the voices in his head--the sarcastic one--pointed out that 'get it over with' was not exactly the most romantic terminology with which to refer to his ultimate union with his beloved. "The big wedding with the big guest list and the bigger price tag was Anya's idea." He tilted his head back, staring up at the water-marked ceiling. "I just can't believe..." Spike was watching him with snide amusement. "Forget it. You've got no idea what kind of commitment this--"

Spike stopped pacing and roared with laughter. "Commitment? You lost track of who you're talking to? Hundred and twenty years, mate. And if you think your demon bird's high-maintenance, you give Dru a try."

Xander surged to his feet, fists clenched. "Anya's not a God-damned demon! Stop calling her that, or I'll--"

Spike's brows climbed up his forehead, accompaniment to a smarmy grin. "What's the matter, Harris, afraid your firstborn will pop out all veiny and vengeful?"

Xander didn't think; he just swung. He didn't even see Spike move; one second the vampire was there, and the next second he wasn't, and Xander's fist smashed into the wall behind him. "AAAHHHHH!!! Fuck!" Xander fell to his knees and contracted into a ball of agony around his throbbing knuckles.

"And not even a hole in the wall to show for it," Spike observed from his new vantage point three feet to the left. He slapped his palm against the tile. "Quality workmanship, this." He put his head to one side and regarded Xander with pursed lips and hollowed cheeks. "You really are the biggest prat in creation, Harris."

Xander slumped against the wall, his forehead pressed into the cold tile. After some minutes of strained, breathless gasping of 'ow, ow, ow,' he rolled over painfully and cradled his injured fist in his lap. "And you're thinking that there's some chance I haven't noticed this?"

"Not really, but I never tire of calling it to your attention." Spike dropped to his haunches and draped a hand over each knee, rocking back and forth with a look of honest curiosity. "What the hell are you narked about? Is this still about me and Buffy?"

_Yes. No. I take the Fifth._ "Let's see." Xander started to tick things off on his fingers, thought better of it, and continued sans visual aids. "Buffy's lost her mind and is dating another vampire."

"If it's any comfort, I wouldn't say there've been any actual dates involved."

"Shut up, I'm on a roll. Anya has half a dozen old co-workers in town, all of whom think I'm human trash, and has been gabbing happily on about the good old vengeancy days of yore--and yeah, it does bother me just a tiny bit that the woman I love spent a thousand years maiming and torturing guys who may have been creeps of one sort of another but probably didn't all deserve to have their parts rot off and their bodies devoured by army ants. I know that's not PC of me, but tough. And in less than three weeks I'm getting married and I'm going to be personally responsible for the welfare of another human being for the rest of our lives, so I am just a little bit nervous, all right? Everyone else around here gets to explode in random violence whenever they've had a bad day; I'm just joining the club."

"Ah. Translation: It's hard to get shirty about the Slayer's choice of snogging partner when Anyanka's record of bloodshed and destruction puts yours truly to shame."

_Exactly_. "No, it's totally different. Anya's human now."

"Ah. Right. That old song again."

"Eat flaming death, English pig-dog."

They sat there for awhile. "She's a tidy bird, Anya." Spike pulled his cigarettes out and shook one free. After ceremoniously drawing it to life and taking a long drag, he flicked off his lighter and propped the hand with the smouldering cigarette up on one knee. "You muff this up and you're a bigger wanker than I thought."

"Thought you didn't like her."

"I don't. Don't think she's too fond of me, either, but that doesn't mean we can't get on." At Xander's expression he assumed a smirk of superiority. "It's a demon thing. You wouldn't understand."

"Well, it won't matter if we end up wandering around the bowels of the Great Underground Empire for the next sixty years." Xander shoved his hair out of his eyes with his good hand and tried to estimate the time. It felt like hours, but the corridors were only a couple hundred feet long at most, and it couldn't possibly take more than five minutes to walk from intersection to intersection. Figure in more time for arguments, secret panel hunting, and staring hopelessly into space, and they couldn't have been here more than an hour, hour and a half tops. Not long enough to feel hopeless about getting out, but plenty long enough to engender growing panic about job security. _We are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike._ Except not twisty. And not likely to be eaten by grues. Vampires, on the other hand... "Academically speaking, exactly how hungry do you have to get before the pain just doesn't matter any more?"

Spike closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall. "Doesn't matter; you'll be dead of thirst inside a week and I can eat you in comfort." His lip curled. "I'd rather gnaw on loose insulation."

At least there was a plentiful supply of it, Xander thought morosely. He looked up at the nearest bundle of cables. Strands of clean, unflaking plastic twined about one another, their colors bright and eye-catching. What the... "Spike?" Spike looked up from his cigarette, which had gone out, glower set on 'kill.' Xander pointed to the cable. "Does this look different to you?"

"Of course it--" Spike flicked his lighter off and stuffed it back in his pocket, and crawled over to peer at the cables. He frowned at them from below for a moment, looked over his shoulder at the other cables visible, and got to his feet. Round the circuit of tunnels he prowled, poking, prodding, and sniffing. At last he halted in front of one of the bundles, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and looking perplexed. All of them were like new. "There's not even any nubbly bits left on the floor," he said.

"But this is the same intersection." Xander clambered to his feet rather less gracefully. Why the hell had Spike had to mention dying of thirst? Now he was parched, and the constant distant drip, drip, drip of water that they never reached wasn't helping. He tapped the tile with the black smudge in the center. "There's the cigarette burn, right..." He blinked. There was, in fact, no black smudge to be seen.

"No, it's this one, you--bloody hell." Spike made another round of inspection. "It's gone."

Xander worried the inside of his cheek. "OK, I thought I knew what was going on here. Some kind of teleport trap. Oldest trick in the Dungeonmaster's Handbook. But this is downright disturbing. It can't be of the good."

"Oh, can't it?" Spike looked grim. "Did it ever occur to you to wonder what exactly happens when the Balance gets too far out of kilter on the side of goodness and light?"

"Not really. 700 Club marathons?"

Spike's shoulders twitched in an involuntary shudder. "Hang on a bit and you'll find out."


	23. Chapter 23

"It can't be that bad," Xander said. He leaned back against the wall and folded his hands behind his head. "By definition. So the Balance tips too far towards the good. Oh, the horror, not."

Spike exhaled a plume of smoke with a look that said 'If I were Kzinti, my name would be Speaker-to-Idiots.' "How far are we from the Hellmouth? Two miles?"

Xander called the grid of Sunnydale's major streets to mind and did a quick triangulation. They'd gone underground at the manhole at the intersection west of the apartment complex, and the burnt-out wreck of Sunnydale High was... "Closer to a mile and a half." An unpleasant thought struck him. "Or we were before we got stuck in this...whatever it is. I have no idea where we are now."

"Right." Spike rubbed the side of his nose, as if it itched. "As it happens, yours truly cracked a few books on Hellmouths back when I was making plans to bring Drusilla here to take the waters."

Despite Willow's insistence that Spike was a closet geek, the idea of him cracking books any more demanding than 'Lust Kittens of Venus' was something Xander had trouble taking seriously. "I feel expository dialogue coming on. 'And as you know, Xander--'"

Spike glared. "Mystical portal leading to a hell dimension, blah blah, take as given. Point is, the Hellmouth's aura affects the whole town, and especially these tunnels. Things happen here, usually bad. The Hellmouth sends out emanations of chaos and nastiness, attracts the attention of discerning evildoers everywhere--" he bowed with an ironic flourish. "--and hawks up the occasional Ascended demon to bugger up the lives of the common throng." He wheeled about, craning his neck down one of the passages. "D'you hear that?"

Xander resisted the urge to peer after him. If there wasn't anything there, it was pointless; if there was something there and Spike was just now catching it, it was just as pointless, since Spike's hearing was ten times better than his. "All I hear is the sound of one vamp yapping. This is Hellmouth 101. So?"

"So. Doesn't happen too often that the Balance swings too far in the opposite direction in the vicinity of a Hellmouth, but I ran across one or two mentions--think it was in Ruprecht's _Alternus Mundi_\--or was it..." Spike contemplated the arabesques of cigarette smoke coiling upwards in front of his nose and frowned. "Ah, bugger it, I can't remember. Had a blue cover, whatever it was. What it comes down to is this: under the right conditions, a Hellmouth can do a flip." The vampire picked up his axe and gestured round at the tiled walls--one, two, three, four. The rust and mold stains were almost gone now, and the shattered remnants of Spike's earlier temper tantrum had vanished. The formerly broken section of tile was as pristine as the rest of the wall. "This look like chaos and nastiness to you? Perfect symmetry. Everything getting cleaner and newer and better."

Xander's attempt at keeping a straight face lasted about five seconds. He broke into a snicker. "Oh, come on," he chortled. "You mean we're now living on a... a Heavenmouth?" He clasped his hands and rolled his eyes skywards. "Which will spread sweetness and light and, what, hawk up the occasional televangelist? Even if you're right, what are we supposed to be scared of? Random acts of kindness and non-violence? Do they bring on the comfy chairs?"

"Harris, will you remove your tiny withered brain from its protective wrapping and use it for a change?" Spike didn't sound as if he were joking. He was scratching at one ear, twitchy and uncomfortable, as if the air around them were becoming something inimical. "Forget the harps and halos, this is real life. Who's the closest representative of the forces of goodness and virtue you know?"

"Buffy, I guess, but--oh." The forces of goodness and virtue around these parts were not exactly reluctant to kick ass. "Point taken. But we're good guys. Why would they hurt us? Well, I'm a good guy. I guess you're toast. Wish I could say it was nice knowing you, but--"

Spike began a restless quartering of the intersection, hands locked behind his back. "The Slayer's small change, cosmically speaking--yeh, Buffy took on a hellgod and won, but that's Buffy. There's things out there that could eat Glory for lunch, things that could send me up in flames with a look." He met Xander's budding objection with a snort. "And don't get too comfortable yourself, bricklayer. Remember the Judge?"

"Otherwise known as Xander Harris's finest hour?" Or maybe second finest; the wrecking ball had been pretty good, too. "Surely you jest." Spike's eyes went misty with nostalgia and a wicked grin split his lean face. "If there's one regret in my life it's that I couldn't be there to see Angelus's face when that bazooka went off."

"Oh, God, it was priceless. I wish I'd had a camera..." Xander realized that he was matching Spike grin for grin and forced a frown. Spike's grew a trifle more wicked.

"Keep in mind that at the height of my career as a master vampire, in the midst of a plot to destroy the world no less, I wasn't evil enough to pass the big blue bastard's muster." Spike blew a smoke ring and cocked an eyebrow at him. "Granted I lost points for taking the destroy-the-world part as a lark that'd never come off, but still. D'you think you're pure enough in heart to shake hands with his opposite number?"

"I..." Xander swallowed. Every rotten thing he'd said and done in the last few years leaped up and started clamoring for attention in the forefront of his mind. _Hyena-Xander, shoving Buffy against the wall. Self-centered teenage asshole Xander, blowing off Willow's crush on him. Not telling Buffy about the re-souling spell. Cheating on Cordelia. A hundred exasperated public putdowns of Anya..._ "...think panic is in order now."

"Wise decision. Take it from someone who's fought 'em, the forces of good are vicious sons of bitches." Spike shouldered his axe and started off down the corridor--no reason, Xander knew; just to be moving, just to be doing _ something._ Xander watched the vampire's black-clad back diminishing in the distance for a minute, then grabbed the tranquilizer gun and broke into a jog to catch up. Better to follow Spike and pretend they were going somewhere than to sit around in the intersection and pretend it wasn't freaky when Spike reappeared out of the opposite tunnel in five or ten minutes. If they ran fast enough, would they see the backs of their own heads?

The tunnel transformed subtly around them as they walked. Xander could never pin down a change in the process of occurring; he'd look away and look back, and something would be different. The cables were taking on an almost cartoonish regularity in their loops and coils, as each tile became a perfect glossy square of pearly white, the light panels in the ceiling distinguishable only by their greater luminance. The light grew softer, clearer, paler, and they walked in enveloping radiance.

Xander found his grip on the stock of the trank gun relaxing, even as he listened for something beyond the distant tap-tap-tap of falling water and the sound of their own footsteps. For all the eeriness of the tunnels, there was a certain comfort in always knowing exactly what the next bend in the road would bring.

Spike didn't share it; he had stopped breathing and was gliding along in full hunting mode, his scuffed Docs making no sound at all on the floor. Xander studied the sweep of black leather in front of him. Whoever Spike had originally stolen that duster from had been several sizes larger than Spike was; the vampire swam in the thing, but as the coat slapped against him, you could still make out the lines of his torso, tapering sharply from breadth of shoulders to narrow hips.

Made a good target. Xander reached into his other coat pocket, the one that held the stake he was seldom without, and turned the length of sharpened oak over and over in his hand. The point would go right there, in the angle between the spine and the left shoulder blade, right between the ribs and into the heart. Buffy could drive a stake effortlessly through bone and muscle from any angle. Xander, merely human, had to worry about stakes getting stuck between the ribs or glancing off a shoulder blade.

He imagined the length of hardwood punching through matte-black leather and the thin layer of black cotton beneath, through ivory skin and into innards just as wet and red and fragile as any living human's, until the stake-point penetrated the heart and all dissolved into dust. He used to do this all the time--with Angel, and later with Spike--imagine what he'd do if either of them ever gave him the excuse. He wondered why he'd stopped. He'd gotten out of the habit, over the summer, led astray by shared patrols and games of pool and arguments over exactly which Plastic Ono Band album sucked the most. He'd lulled himself into--not forgetting, but worse, ignoring, the all-important fact that at the end of the day, Spike was still pretty much a vampire. The whole resurrection thing had jarred him back to reality, and now...

Now he was just slipping back into casual acceptance of this... this thing in front of him? _ Phone ringing as Anya welcomed the first batch of guests. Spike's North London drawl on the other end of the line "Harris. Got a line on a Krallock demon. Feel like killing something? I'll let you use the big gun."_ As much an overture, in its way, as him showing up at the crypt with spicy chicken wings. And he'd accepted it. Fuck. And here he was, following along behind pretty-much-a-vampire with no real intention to plunge that stake in where reason and logic said it should have gone years ago. Double fuck. What was the matter with him? Hanging out with Spike was _wrong._

"If you keep playing with it, you'll go blind." Spike turned on his heel, swift, silent death with ears that could the heart thudding away in his chest, or the scrape of callused fingers against wood. "The suspense is killing me faster than you are."

Xander stopped in the middle of the tunnel, feet braced, holding the gun with the vestige of the professional ease his stint as Soldier Guy had left him. _Step back, dart into the chamber, aim, cock, pull trigger...it would be easy. You know one of these babies will take a vampire down. And then the stake_ . Spike stood there looking at him, dark brows angled in exasperation, not even slightly worried. _Trusting_ him. How twisted was that? "You know something, Spike? Your little fling with Buffy has nothing to do with the reason I hate your guts."

Spike sighed, eyes imploring the heavens for patience. "Do tell."

It didn't. Not the way Spike thought. His crush on Buffy was a thing of the past. All right, he had occasional lusty thoughts. What guy wouldn't? Maybe if the two of them weren't so damned obvious about it. Maybe if they didn't touch so often. Maybe if he didn't have the image of Buffy standing in his foyer with her tongue halfway down Spike's throat burned onto the back of his eyelids...

_Maybe if Buffy can love an out-and-out demon and I can't handle an ex-demon there's something wrong with me, not her._

Slam that thought back in lockup where it belonged. "It's real simple. Half a dozen kids I grew up with, ate lunch with, and got beat up by ended up as snack food for you or Dru or one of your minions. And a few of 'em came back for a return engagement on the business end of Buffy's stake. Never hesitated a minute." Four-year-old memories came flooding back--how had he forgotten all this? How had all of them come to tolerate Spike's company? How could two years' worth of grudging, chip-goaded help possibly make up for a century plus of cheerful murder? "What the hell makes you so special?" Spike's face remained impassive, and Xander took a belligerent step forward. "How come you're walking around and not Jesse or Andy Runyon or Terry Lane?"

Spike studied him for a long minute. "Because life's got steel-toed boots and delights in applying them to the family jewels, Harris. You haven't figured that one out by now?"

"You gonna claim you're sorry they're dead?"

"No." Spike cocked his head to one side, what looked like real regret time-sharing with wary curiosity in his eyes. "But sometimes I wish I could be." He scratched absently at his jaw. "Then I come to my senses. Is there a point to this conversation besides the one you're fondling?"

There was a point, all right--if he admitted for a second the possibility of not-enemyhood with Spike, he was betraying _real_ friends. And if that was bad when he did it, how much worse was it when Buffy, the Slayer herself, slept with the enemy? Everything seemed so clear down here, in the pearly glow of the tunnel. Spike was evil. Evil through and through. There were no shadows here, no greys, just pure, white, comforting light which showed him that Spike was...

Red in the face? Now _that_ was wrong. "Uh... Spike... Are you supposed to sunburn indoors?"

Spike touched a startled hand to his cheek and drew it away with a hiss; the pale marks of his fingertips lingered on his skin for a few seconds before fading back to unnatural ruddiness. "Balls! Sunlight!" He glanced up and around; there was no shelter to speak of in the slowly brightening tunnels. "Enough dicking around. We've got to get out of here."

Xander shook his head again, hard, trying to shake the fuzz out. His thoughts were all his own, but down here some thoughts were more equal than others--ways to dispose of Spike sprang easily to mind. Cooperating with an evil soulless vampire to get out, on the other hand--he couldn't wrap his brain around the idea; he was blundering through a spiritual algebra class, all his thoughts blunted and sluggish.

But he was used to that, wasn't he? Used to being the last one to get it, and getting it anyway, in his own good time. And no fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good tunnel of love was going to mess with his head and get away with it, any more than some cut-rate Prince of Darkness was going to make him play Renfield again. _I'll hate Spike on my own dime, damn it, I don't need any help from you._ "Yeah. We do." He forced the words out with a sense of triumph. _ We. Take that, fuzzy goodness_! "How?"

Spike flicked his cigarette butt down the corridor, hefted his axe and grinned, squinting against the too-clear light. "If you can't find a way out, you bloody well make one." The skin across his cheeks and the backs of his hands was starting to prickle and burn, just as it had walking under cloudy daylight skies. Should have been impossible; a vampire's little sunlight allergy was metaphysical, not physical--no man-made light, no matter how closely it duplicated full-spectrum sunlight, should have been able to do the trick. Obviously the lights in this tunnel were no longer exactly as men had made them.

Close enough, though. Was he starting to smoke slightly, or was that just the remains of his cigarette? Time for some preventive maintenance. Spike flipped the axe end over end, caught it and jabbed upwards, ducking aside as the haft smashed through the nearest light panel and shattered the bulb inside into a thousand razor-edged snowflakes. He repeated the process with the light panels on either side. "Much better," he breathed as the final shower of glass heralded the return of relative darkness along a twenty-foot segment of the tunnel.

Spontaneous combustion forestalled for the time being, Spike shook glittering fragments of glass off his shoulders and reversed the axe again, swinging it through a limbering arc. There was something out there in this infinitely reflected latticework of tunnels, pacing them, spying on them; he could sense it, just on the edge of his perceptions, a magnetic repulsion. His opposite number, more or less, probably gritting its teeth, if it had any, over his presence at this moment. And who better to open the door than the blokes who built the castle? "We're probably going to have company soon," he said. "Don't imagine the proprietors will look kindly on me making a mess."

Xander looked up and down the tunnel. "I thought we were avoiding the forces of goodness and virtue?"

"Changed my mind. Who better to let us out than the blokes who built the place?" Spike ran his index finger down the axe-blade's notched edge, licked it, savoring the pain and the taste of his own blood with connoisseur's appreciation. The prospect of action was cheering. "Not likely we'll attract anything much nicer than I am nasty, this early in the game. But if we do, you'll just have to put in a good word." His grin went sharp-fanged and feral, eyes shining lambent yellow under ridged brows; William the Bloody, not even trying to be good, not the least little bit.

The axe-blade whistled through the air and sank into the nearest bundle of wall-cable with a THOK!, half-severing the whole mass. Another fountain of sparks exploded outwards, and the tunnel filled with the stink of ozone as individual strands of cable sprang apart, red and blue and green, hissing and crackling like an angry hydra. He jumped back, feeling something in his shirt-pocket thump against his chest. The lights flickered and dimmed for fifty feet in either direction. "YEAH!" Spike howled, and hauled back for another strike, lion-gold eyes burning in the manufactured darkness. The axe-blade flashed again and electrical mayhem ensued. More light panels died. "Burn me up sight unseen, will you? CREATURE OF SODDING DARKNESS HERE! YOU WANT ME? COME GET ME!"

"These are the torch-you-with-a-look guys? Is this really a good idea?" Xander backed nervously down the tunnel.

"One of my plans, and you have to ask?" The third blow bypassed the cables and smashed into the tile, which exploded into mother-of-pearl powder under the force of it. The fourth sent chunks of plaster and concrete flying like shrapnel. Somewhere Xander was yelling at him to watch it, but Spike was lost in the moment, face a snarling demonic mask of fury, caught up in the orgasmic rush of destruction. Nothing in the world existed but to break and tear and ravage, to ruin the dull perfection of this place--and the only thing missing was best part of all, the sour tang of fear and the screams of the dying. Harris's racing heart was a siren song, calling up lush, sensual images of the blade tearing through bone and muscle like a knife through Camembert, of fangs in flesh and sweet hot blood flowing and the bastard had never liked him, fine to use old Spike for muscle but God forbid you let him touch the women and all he'd have to do was lose that last sliver of self-control and--

\--and the chip, thank God and That Fucking Bitch Walsh, would knock him flat on his arse. There was a perverse freedom in knowing he could let his worst self rage and foam and not have to worry about the consequences. Spike put his back into it and swung again, and the whole wall shuddered and cracked, plaster and cement falling away in huge flaking slabs and choking the tunnel with dust. The axe-blade was starting to blunt and deform under the force of his blows, but Spike was past noticing; the hole in the wall was deep enough to stick an arm in up to the elbow.

CEASE.

It came from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the tolling of bells, like a chord struck on an organ whose pipes were the winds themselves. Spike froze mid-swing at the sound, hated it from the first note and longed for it never to fall silent, yearning so mixed with loathing it made him physically ill, tied knots in his gut and pulled them tighter with every note. Radiance flooded the tunnel again and he threw a hand up to guard his eyes, snarling, fighting to regain ascendancy over himself.

It was a whirlwind of eyes, a rush of wings, a clash of blades, a shining in the air. It slid away from any attempt to pin it down with words; it was beautiful beyond thought, and Spike balled up his desolation and fear and longing and stuffed it down into the sub-basements of his mind. He turned to face the approaching creature with all his customary bravado, leaning on the handle of his beat-up axe and smirking into the face of heaven. It spread vast pinions, every covert a glittering razor, every primary a saber of light. CREATURE OF DARKNESS, YOU HAVE NO PLACE HERE.

"That's ducky by me," said Spike. "Why don't you let us out, then?"

"Spiiiike," Xander said, jabbing him in the ribs with an elbow. He gave the thing a sickly grin. "Don't pay any attention to my idiot friend here, he's got Tourette's. It compels him to stupidly insult supernatural creatures way bigger than he is. If you'll show us the way out I promise to take him home and put him to bed with a nice bottle of whiskey and--" Aside, to Spike, he hissed, "What is that thing?"

"Harrier demon," Spike whispered back, taking the opportunity to feel around under cover of the duster. What the hell did he have in his pocketses? String, or... his fingers met glass and metal. Bloody sodding hell, not nothing, his glasses. After Buffy'd left the crypt this afternoon he'd put them on to read the footy scores and gnash his teeth over the match report of Man U's humiliating loss to West Ham. He must have tucked them into his pocket after, while constructing an elaborate and impractical scheme to stow away on a cargo plane to England and eat Jerome Defoe. The second time he'd done that lately, and he couldn't afford to be that careless with them; it wasn't as if he could pop over to the nearest Lenscrafters and get a new prescription. Xander was staring at him curiously; Spike stuffed the spectacles back down in his pocket and affected indifference. "Heard of 'em. Never seen one before."

"If it's a demon, what's with the 'creature of darkness' line?"

"It's a _good_ demon, nitwit." And unfortunately well into the incinerate-vampires-with-a-look range. He hadn't expected anything this powerful. "Working directly for the Powers--they don't often mingle with the riff-raff."

"There's good demons?"

Spike gave the Harrier a long-suffering, 'see what I have to put up with?' look. "Now about letting us off this roundabout--"

Unimpressed, it shimmered in the air before them like a heat-mirage in summer, a roiling mist of light and air and terrible swift swords. Its attention fixed upon Xander for a moment, examining, evaluating, and discarding in seconds. YOU ARE FOUND WANTING. YOUR SINS ARE MANY. It paused. BUT INSIGNIFICANT. Its Argus-eyed regard turned upon Spike. I AM CHARGED WITH THE ELIMINATION OF SUCH AS YOU. And blades lashed out like lightning in all directions, searing brilliant tongues of flame.

*****

"...the property was entailed, of course, and went to the cousin in Leicester, but the will settled five hundred pounds apiece on each of Letitia's children..."

"Uh huh." Buffy squinched her eyes at the ceiling a few times, hoping to avert their incipient glazing-over a few seconds longer. She took another swallow of kiwi-strawberry, which, as an alternative to listening to Halfrek, was becoming downright palatable. In order to explain how she'd come to be William's (snarl) _intimate friend_, Halfrek felt it necessary to explain in detail the history of their respective families for three generations back. No matter how juicy, gossip lost its piquancy when it was a hundred and fifty years out of date, and this gossip had been on the desiccated side to begin with--so far Spike's--_William's_\--family came off as the sort of people who showed up as background characters in a duller-than-average A&amp;E miniseries.

"...so when the family removed to Hampshire, William's father married the youngest Cavendish girl, and..."

Another generation down. Maybe they'd get William conceived before the party was over. Buffy began assembling a cast list in her head for _Middlemarch II: The Revenge of Dorothea._ _Spike in a cravat. Mmm. Not bad._ She added black leather boots, a riding crop, and those skin-tight riding breeches to her mental image and mussed up its hair a little. _Mmmmmm... very bad._

On the other side of the coffee table, Anya shucked the wrapping from another combination waffle iron/grill and added it to the varicolored paper mountain at her feet. There were two identical gifts in the pile of opened presents already, and Buffy felt a faint sense of satisfaction that at least her present hadn't been a re-run. "This is lovely, though redundant," Anya said, examining Waffle Iron #3. For Anya, that was the height of tact.

"It does Belgian," Lorri pointed out.

Anya's eyes grew damp and her lower lip trembled. "Xander loves Belgian waffles."

Trembly Anya + pissed off Xander = another argument. Buffy tossed her hair out of her eyes. Maybe she should try to talk to him... _Advice to the lovelorn from Buffy Summers, number one on the doomed relationship hit parade for five years running! Run, Xander, run!_

"..._hate_ My Little Pony," Sandra said to Tara, who was hanging over the back of the couch next to Willow. "Horse craziness is all about girls coming to terms with sex and masculine power, for that you need a _ horse. _ Take the Black Stallion novels--"

"See, this is why I was destined for the lesbian thing," Willow said. "Horses are just four hooves waiting to step on your foot."

Tara pouted. "I loved those books! And 'King of the Wind!'"

Sandra nodded and gestured violently with a carrot stick. "The whole point is that the Black's a half-wild killer, but he loves Alex and will do anything for him. Our daughter eats that up. The toy companies of America take this primal symbol of power and virility and neuter it, make it into these harmless little pastel eunuchs with fluffy tails..."

"...so when the season opened I came up to London and was most displeased to discover William had let a room in..."

Drat. Missed William's conception altogether. "Buffy, when can we fit you for your bridesmaid's dress?" Lorri cut across the several lines of conversation.

It was astonishing how much a wine cooler or two did to reconcile one to asparagus green. Though the thought of those ruffles still elicited a shudder of horror. Buffy selected a Triscuit and topped it with a slice of cheddar. "Um... I'm probably free Tuesday or Wednesday. Monday we have that, um, thing."

"Ah, yes. The thing. Wednesday is good," Anya said. She surveyed Buffy with an appraising eye. "It's a good thing I didn't ask right after you came back. You're gaining weight and the dress wouldn't have fit by January."

Buffy choked on her cracker. "Thank you, because I so needed to hear that."

Anya patted her shoulder with a kindly smile. "Oh, don't worry, you're still way too skinny."

Sandra paused in railing against the evils of small pink plastic horses to the prepubescent feminine psyche to eye Buffy's reed-slim body and raise a skeptical eyebrow. "Please, God, can I gain weight like that?"

Leaning back against the sofa cushions and listening to the voices swirl around her, Buffy could see with Slayer-vision clarity--perhaps it was the kiwi-strawberry going to her head--a future where this was her life, where there was no mysterious thing on Monday to interfere with dress fittings, where her conversations would revolve around diets and children and office gossip and subverting the paradigm of corporate America. And it wouldn't be perfect and it wouldn't be safe, because husbands had industrial accidents and mothers died of brain hemorrhages and sisters got caught shoplifting. Side by side with the two-point-five-kids-and-white-picket-fence future was another: darker, stranger, wilder. Herself at thirty, or forty, or fifty, a thin tough woman with stormy eyes and hard hands, going places and doing things which defied description, with a lean pale man at her side who looked far too young for her. No kids, unless Dawn provided some nieces and nephews for her and Spike to spoil rotten. No marriage, unless heart given for heart counted for as much or more than legal formality. No easy answers as she grew older and he didn't. And the only thing that picket fence would be used for was making stakes.

Door Number One, Door Number Two. Or you can go for the box behind the curtain...

The building shuddered. Little shrieks and yips of surprise broke out around the room; pictures rattled on the wall and dishes clinked and jittered on the tables. In the contents of every half-full glass and bottle concentric waves shivered in and out of existence and a few of the women dashed for doorways in the native Californian's instinctive search for load-bearing masonry. Outside a grinding rumble culminated in a cannon-loud crack of noise--had one of the other buildings collapsed?

Buffy was halfway to the front door before her brain caught up with her reflexes and pointed out that the noise was far out of proportion to anything such a mild tremor should have caused. As she threw open the door, the parking lot exploded in a blaze of white light, bright as midday, shining from a raw crater thirty feet across in the middle of the landscaping between Xander's building and the next. The turf was thrown back as if exploded from below and a whole segment of the adjoining sidewalk and parking lot was a crumpled bank of asphalt and concrete; the carport over the residents' parking spaces was peeled back upon itself like the lid of a sardine tin, its supporting posts poking crazily into the floodlit sky. Several cars had tipped over, wheels spinning helplessly like the feet of glittering upended beetles. And rising out of the crater...

"What is--?" Willow was right behind her. "Oh my--Buffy, is that a demon?"

Buffy licked her suddenly-dry lips, staring down at the incandescent creature below. "I don't know." Small dark figures swam across the bright background. "But whatever it is, there's people--"

Anya shouldered her way through the door, shoving Willow and Buffy aside. She stood on the landing with fingers pressed to lips. "Xander!"

"Anya! Wait!" Buffy cried, grabbing for her arm, but Anya was gone, racing down the steps and out into the parking lot. Buffy sprang after her, shouting "Come on, Will!" over her shoulder and taking the clattering stairs three at a time.

*****

A wing of light arced across Spike's midriff, shearing through cloth and leather and flesh, the sword-blades of its primaries stained with dark blood when they swept away. The vampire dropped to a crouch, flinging the tails of his duster up and over his head as his flesh began to scorch in the intensity of the blaze. Xander charged forwards with a yell, whirling the trank gun overhead, straight into the face--well, the front, at least--of their opponent. It hadn't expected that, and instead of parrying reared up and back, trying to avoid hurting him. Whirlwind supernatural energies met earth and stone, colliding with the low ceiling, and the tunnel rocked with the basso rumble of earth tearing apart. Tiles fell in a blinding ceramic rain and half the roof vaporized. Screams and the blaring of half a dozen car alarms floated down through the hole in the sky.

If the falling ceiling didn't bury him, he was going to choke to death. Xander stumbled blindly for a minute, totally lost. A sunburnt face loomed out of the dust and Spike's cold hard fingers circled his wrist, yanking him forward through the falling rubble. "Listen whelp, if I give you a toss up, can you catch hold up there?"

Xander shoved lank dark locks of hair out of his eyes and looked up; tattered indigo sky framed in fractal black had replaced gently glowing tile. "I have no idea." The air crackled as the Harrier surged towards them. "Find out, now!"

Spike immediately shifted his grip to Xander's belt and coat-collar. Xander had the stomach-churning sensation of being lifted off the ground like a kitten. With a grunt of effort Spike heaved him overhead and tossed him into the air, and Xander was sailing over the Harrier demon's head, or top, or whatever, seeing his spread-eagled, flailing self reflected in dozens of astonished crystalline eyes. He slammed face-first into the sloping rim of the crater, sliding downwards in a small landslide of earth and gravel and catching himself with a few desperate frog-kicks at the rubble.

He clawed his way over the rim and turned around in time to see Spike take a running leap straight at the Harrier. It might look like someone had blown the CGI budget, but the blades it was slicing and dicing and trying to make Julienne vampire with were real enough. His burnt lips skinned back over his fangs in a savage snarl, Spike brought the axe down and the dulled blade sank home, cleaving translucent eyes that bled rays of light into the dust-laden air. Spike hauled himself up along the haft of the axe, the toes of his boots jabbing for purchase among the joints of wings which flickered in and out of existence like the ghosts of bad cable reception. He stood for one precarious moment balanced on shifting air; then his lean body uncoiled, all the power in the muscles of calf and thigh released at once. Fifteen feet straight up he shot, his outstretched arms straining for the sky. At the apex of his leap one hand grasped a projecting shelf of broken asphalt, fingers raking gouges in the crumbling tar.

Out of the roiling mass of dust and grit the Harrier rose, a sunrise in the depths of midnight. It shook the axe free, its wound closing even as they watched, and soared upwards in glory. A fury of blades whirled upwards, and Spike, bathed in its painful light, jerked both knees up to his chest barely in time to escape losing a foot.

Xander belly-flopped over the edge as far as he could reach and clamped his hand around Spike's wrist. The normally-cool flesh was radiating heat from the burns he'd sustained, and it must have hurt like hell, but Spike didn't flinch. The asphalt outcropping disintegrated under the pressure of Spike's fingers and his full weight came down on Xander's arm and shoulder with a bone-wrenching jerk. For a small eternity Xander held a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight vampire one-handed, dangling over the lip of the new-made pit. Then he heaved upwards, panting with effort; Spike's free hand found another ledge, and he was up and over the rim. Spike lurched to his feet and the two of them stood swaying on the precipice, clutching one another's shoulders as if that'd make a difference if the whole edge dropped out from under them.

Spike favored Xander with his smarmiest grin. "Awwww. Harris is my bestest pal."

"So do you actually _want_ to end up a big pile of dust?" The Harrier spun up out of the crater, a tornado of sunlit razor plumage. "I think you got it mad," Xander observed.

"You think?" Spike swiped his sleeve across his nose--on second glance, maybe he wasn't as badly burned as Xander'd thought, not too much worse than the sunburn he'd gotten showing off last week. All to the good; watching charred vampire bits flake off wasn't high on his big fun agenda. Xander looked around; half a dozen car alarms were still blatting a maddening symphony in the background, set off by the noise and tremor, and people were pouring out of the complexes to see what was going on. There were several overturned cars in the parking lot, one of which, a small dark blue Tercel, was teetering precariously on the very edge of the crater. He felt a most unheroic relief at the thought that his car was parked at the other end of the lot.

With a thunder of wings the creature was out of the hole and after them. Spike toppled backwards, dragging Xander with him. Both of them scrambled away from the pit on hands and knees before lurching to their feet. Xander spun round in place, looking for a weapon. Rocks. There had to be something a step up from rocks.

"Xander!" Anya's voice, a terrified screech over the car alarms. "Are you all right?"

The Harrier halted, mantling its multitude of wings, a raptor sighting new prey. It didn't attack at once, as if Anya confused its senses. It hovered in place, undecided between two targets, the wind of its passage kicking up a flurry of dust and debris. CHILD OF ARASHMAHAR? it asked, its voice the crackle of windblown flame. Anya froze, mesmerized by the creature as it hovered over the parking lot, but new determination filled her dark eyes and she started towards Xander again.

"Oh, bollocks!" Spike was off like a flash, tearing off round the rim of the crater in the opposite direction, to what purpose Xander couldn't tell--saving his own skin, maybe; with his departure the terror of wings and eyes swooped down upon Anya, whirling blades leaving trails of fire on the air.

"NO!" Xander screamed, the harsh panicked sound of a man losing something vital. He forgot Spike, forgot the fact that this thing could turn him into shish kebab, forgot everything except the fact that it was bearing down on Anya. He broke into a stumbling run around the edge of the pit, jumping chunks of sidewalk. Anya screamed as well, fear and anger striking sparks in her voice, and flung a ragged fist-sized hunk of asphalt at the oncoming Harrier. It hit a sword blade and bounced off.

"Keep away from her!" he yelled, painfully aware of his complete inability to back up his threat. He skidded to a halt, interposing himself between Anya and the Harrier. A quarter of the way around the pit, he caught a glimpse of Willow, her hair an unmistakable blaze of red in the parking lot floodlights. She floated up to perch on the bed of an overturned Ford Rambler and stood there like a general surveying a battlefield, then flung her arms skyward and began a chant. The words squirmed away from his head when he tried to remember them. Violet lightning began to gather about her outstretched hands, snap crackle pop.

If it wasn't willing to hurt him, and he could just play human shield for long enough... Willow'd come through.

I HAVE NO WISH TO HARM YOU, the Harrier hissed in the dry wail of Santa Ana winds, feinting right and left with razor-tipped wings.

"Well, then, don't!" Xander wondered if he could get behind a car or something, but all the vehicles were on the other side of the crater. A bush, then, or a lamp post--anything besides thin air.

IT IS MY DUTY TO SLAY CREATURES OF EVIL.

"Harming her is harming me, you Electrical Parade reject!" Xander pulled Anya into a protective hug and she burrowed into his shoulder, sobbing. "And she's not a demon!"

NO. YET HER ESSENCE CONTAINS VAST DARKNESS.

Essence? "Ahn, what's it's talking about?" Was that her soul? They never talked about that trickiest of subjects if they could help it; easier just to assume that human form came with a human soul included.

The Harrier shimmied back and forth, restless and, to Xander's possibly biased perceptions, pissed off. THERE IS IMBALANCE HERE. CONFUSION.

"Sodom and Gomorrah, rains of frogs, Slayers and vampires living together, yeah, yeah! What's that got to do with Anya?"

HAVE YOU NOT TOLD HIM, CHILD OF ARASHMAHAR?

Anya moaned, and Xander looked wildly from her to the Harrier. "Told me what? Anya, what--"

Her head drooped, and then Anya straightened, pulling away from him and straightening her jacket. She looked the Harrier in the eyes, fear replaced with resignation. "It can tell," she said, her voice shaking only a little.

"Tell what?"

"What I am." Anya began putting her hair in order, unnaturally composed. "What I've always been. Well, not always, but for the last thousand years, give or take a decade."

Xander stared at her. Anya: straightforward to the point of rudeness. Able to rattle off the histories of a dozen major demon clans in excruciating detail and completely in the dark about the social relevance of _Star Wars._ Rapaciously intelligent about subjects that interested her, a financial whiz and cutthroat business woman, beautiful, sexy, desperately in love with him... and human, absolutely, positively human.

Except that she'd started out with no more concern for the welfare of non-Xander humans than Spike had for non-Buffy humans, and still wasn't exactly a font of charity. And she looked back as fondly on her days of meting out destruction as Spike did. And... "You don't have a soul," he whispered.

"I do too!" Anya shot back, unnatural calm giving way to familiar and reassuring brusqueness. She stamped one well-shod foot. "I was born human, you know! I have a perfectly good soul, it's just--complicated. When D'Hoffryn recruits us to be vengeance demons we're... converted. Given the demonic aspect, and the powers, and the pendant to control them. And cleansed of..." She gave a fidgety twist of one hand. "Distractions."

"Distractions?"

"You know." Anya folded her arms defensively across her chest. "Empathy. All that tiresome feeling sorry for people. We wouldn't be any good as vengeance demons if we got half-way through a wish and started feeling sorry for the victim, would we? I became a demon when I was seventeen, and..." A spot of hectic red appeared on each cheek, but she kept her head high and defiant. "I never un-became one. I gave myself human form to grant Cordelia's wish, and when my pendant was destroyed I got stuck this way, but it didn't change who I was inside. I've always been Anyanka--if D'Hoffryn would ever give me a new pendant, the big meanie."

The Harrier demon flickered from side to side; Xander suspected that had it not been beneath its dignity, (and had it possessed a visible mouth) the thing would have been smirking and saying _I told you so!_ Xander drew a deep gulping breath. "Anya's not evil. No matter what else she may be, she's not evil. She helps people now."

"I never was evil," Anya said, irritated. "More amoral. Most demons are. Honestly, with the exception of species like vampires who give the rest of us a bad name, the whole 'demon equals evil' thing is overdone." She gave the Harrier a nervous smile. "As you should know, uh, sir, being a good demon yourself. Not to mention that I'm all contaminated again with feelings about people I really have no reason to feel about..."

YOU HAVE CAUSED GREAT SUFFERING. YOUR DEATH IS JUSTICE. Its myriad eyes turned to Xander. I HAVE NO WISH TO HARM YOU, BUT IF I MUST DO SO TO DESTROY THIS CREATURE, I SHALL.

Xander wondered if this was one of those dreams you woke up from to discover you were still dreaming. Here he was, standing in a parking lot, having just saved a vampire's ass and trying to keep his ex-demon fiancée from being touched by an angel, or as near to one as he was probably ever going to see. All his worst fears confirmed. All that was left was to look down and discover he wasn't wearing any pants. And there was Anya gazing at him with brown-velvet eyes no different than they had been this morning, when they woke up together. Eyes brimming with tears and anger. "Why didn't you tell me?" he choked out.

She shook her head. "You would have left me."

It was just a flat statement of fact, and it got him right in the gut. Xander turned back to the Harrier.

YOU KNOW WHAT SHE IS. WILL YOU STAND ASIDE?

Xander stared at the ground, stared at the toes of his boots, stared at his hands. At last he looked up. "Sometimes," he said, sounding far too reasonable in his own ears, "You just get to a place in life where you have to make a radical re-evaluation of the whole good-bad demon-human thing and let me see if I can explain this... I understand Ahn's a demon. And..." He folded his arms and stood foursquare in front of Anya, who looked at him with dawning hope. "I DON'T CARE!"

*****

A handful of Anya's party guests had followed her out to the parking lot and were milling about in confusion. Spike didn't see Halfrek among them; no surprise there, as the gang from Arashmahar generally buggered off at the first sign of trouble. As Spike reached the Tiercel, someone else finally noticed the movements behind the tinted windows that his far-sighted predator's eyes had picked up on at once. An unfamiliar woman's voice shouted, "Lorri, call 911, there's someone stuck in this car! It's going to fall in!"

Ignoring the onlookers, Spike leaped atop the car and crouched beside the driver's door like some exceptionally athletic gargoyle, studying the interior through the window. The door-handle had jammed; pulling at it, he knew from experience, would just rip it off. He needed leverage. Spike balled up a fist in his duster and sent it smashing through the glass, which dissolved in pea-size fragments, then grabbed the window-frame in both hands and pulled. The door shot open with a crash, torn half off its hinges, and Spike ducked head and shoulders inside. Inside was a small dark woman; she'd somehow slipped free of the shoulder harness when the car tipped over, and was hanging half-suspended from the seatbelt, her knees jammed into the steering wheel. He could smell blood, but it was scarcely noticeable over the scent of his own; not enough to indicate serious injury. In the distance he heard the wail of approaching sirens. Best hurry before Sunnydale's finest showed up to complicate matters.

At the sight of Spike coming through the window she began struggling to get away, flopping like a gaffed fish. Spike tried grabbing an ankle, to no avail. "Quit wriggling, you stupid bint, you're being rescued!" The woman's only response was a terrified scream and an attempt to claw through the back of the seat. Spike realized belatedly that he was still in game face and switched back to human features. It didn't seem to help; the woman kicked him in the chest, drawing an answering stab of pain from the cut across his belly. "OW! Bloody--if you don't be still so I can get you out of here, I'm going to knock you senseless, sod the headache!"

A familiar and welcome scent tickled his nose through the tang of hot metal and dust, and a second later Buffy dropped down past him through the open window and began undoing the tangle of seatbelts. "Ma'am, calm down! You're going to be all right! Your knight in shining armor act leaves something to be desired," she observed as Spike bent the steering wheel out of their way a tad. "Maybe more of a Will Smith vibe, less of a Jack Nicholson?"

The car creaked and wobbled under their added weight. Spike shifted as much of his weight as he could forward, and the unnerving teetering stilled for the moment. "New to the hero business, love--I'm still working on my theme song. Here, pass her up."

They handed the dazed woman (she kept staring at Spike and shaking her head, and he had to exert a great deal of willpower to keep from flashing her a little fang just to see her jump) off to one of the newly-arrived paramedics and hopped down off the Tiercel. Spike watched them lead her away, eyes hooded, an indefinable yet strangely familiar emotion teasing round the corners of his heart. He wasn't sure he wanted to pin it down; it reeked of something he didn't want to face head-on yet. Buffy glanced up at him, a little smile curling the corners of her mouth. "The George Hamilton look? Not working."

"Ta ever so. I'll pawn the tanning bed."

"What're we looking at?"

From teasing to General Buffy, all terse and commandery, demanding a report from her second-in-command. Spike glanced across the pit; Xander was still playing dodge 'em with the winged wonder. "Harrier demon. They're warriors of light--don't usually muck around with us vamps; it'd be like shooting flies with a cannon. They get sent after things like your late unlamented Mayor."

"Then why's it after Anya?"

Spike shook his head. "Buggered if I know. 'Less it can tell she used to be a demon; they can sniff out the wicked like bloodhounds, and vengeance demons are a bloody sight more powerful than a mere vampire. D'Hoffryn's girls can only grant wishes according to the rules, and Harriers are keen on rules--but the collateral damage from a few badly-phrased wishes alone would set that shiny bastard off. Our Anya was a vengeance demon for a long, long time."

"Well, she's not now." Buffy looked grim. "How do we stop it?"

A bark of laughter escaped him. "Got a bazooka handy?"

Buffy chewed on her lower lip. "If it's one of the good guys, we can talk to it. It's got to listen. We just need to get its attention."

"Mmm. Suppose beaning it with an axe wasn't conducive to negotiations, then."

Buffy's jaw dropped. "Why did you--?"

Spike opened his mouth, realized he was about to say _Because it bloody near broke my only pair of glasses, that's why!_ and was overcome with the dire conviction that this, in conjunction with whatever Halfrek had already told her about the general pathetic wankerdom of his breathing days, would undoubtedly mean the end of his and Buffy's short but eventful relationship in a fit of hysterical laughter. "It hit me first."

"Oh. Then I wouldn't hang around the mailbox waiting for a letter from the Nobel committee, no." Buffy looked around, then pointed to the collapsed carport, a crumpled length of fiberglass and steel draped across the hoods of half-a-dozen assorted cars. "Attention-getting device."

Spike grinned at her. "On it, love." Buffy crouched down, wrapped her arms around the base of the support beam and pulled, her face contorted with effort. Spike took hold of the scalloped edge if the roof where the two pieces were bolted together and ripped. Rivets popped and sun-weakened fiberglass snapped, and the whole thing tore free with a crash. Spike shoved the roof section away, and it landed with a crash, doing serious damage to the roof of the Geo Metro in the nearest parking space. No loss there; the owner should thank him for forcing them to get a real car.

In a trice they wrestled the support pole free of its moorings. They had a weapon, twelve feet of twisted metal, one end terminating in a club of cement where they'd torn it free of the pavement. Unwieldy as hell, but big enough to make the Harrier sit up and notice without putting them within slashing reach. He hefted the pole to shoulder height and Buffy looked at him, her nose adorably smudged, her teeth bared in a fighting grin. "Charge!"

Xander pulled Anya out of the way of another slashing appendage as Spike and Buffy barreled towards them at full and terrifying speed. The pole was a bitch and a half to run with, over-balanced at the club-end and inconveniently shaped to grip, but the two of them never missed a step, flying over the uneven ground as if they'd practiced it for weeks. "DUCK!" Spike bellowed, and Xander dropped flat with Anya beneath him. Vampire and Slayer leaped over their heads in unison and rammed the club-end of the rebar into the center of the whirlwind. Half a dozen blades struck sparks rebounding off the metal, and their combined strength and momentum slammed the Harrier back a good twenty feet, spinning above the center of the crater like a psychotic buzzsaw.

SLAYER? The massive composure in its voice wavered for an instant. Had they wounded it? Considering how easily it had shrugged off the axe, that didn't seem likely; they'd done the equivalent of knocking the breath out of it, no more. YOU OPPOSE ME?

Buffy crouched on a concrete slab, teetering on the edge of the pit, her face washed of detail by the Harrier's actinic light. "I won't let you hurt Spike and Anya!"

I AM WHAT YOU ARE. A WARRIOR OF LIGHT. THEY ARE... WHAT WE ARE BOUND TO DESTROY--YOUNGER SISTER, YOU BETRAY YOUR HERITAGE AND YOUR PURPOSE.

"Better that than betray my friends!" Buffy's voice shook with outrage.

Two of the women who'd followed Anya down--Lorri and Sandra--joined Xander in shielding her. Spike gave the two of them an irritated look. Sod it all, they would have to be helpful; he was going to have to revise his list of people he wouldn't kill if the chip came out again. Lorri waved her cell phone at the Harrier angrily. "Leave her alone! What's she done to you?"

IF IT IS YOUR CHOICE TO ALLY YOURSELF WITH CREATURES OF DARKNESS... The dispassionate, beautiful voice rang with genuine regret. THEN I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO...

"Now just a bleeding minute, you've got it backwards!" Spike took an indignant step forward. It was one thing for the Harrier to go after him, or even Anya, quite another for it to slang Buffy. "The creatures of darkness are allied with _her!"_

"Exactly!" Buffy's chin jutted. "They're helping me. You don't need to hurt them."

The Harrier hovered there, fizzling to itself like a Guy Fawkes bonfire that hadn't quite come off. YOU ALLY YOURSELF WITH HER FOR SELFISH REASONS? it asked, sounding almost hopeful, as if this would give it a comfortable out.

"Right," Spike said, plumbing new depths of sarcasm. "Completely, utterly selfish. Makes a big difference to my hapless victims." He tapped his skull with a forefinger. "The batteries go south tomorrow, and I happen on a tasty morsel in some alley during my midnight stroll--" He bared his fangs and adopted a menacing crouch. "Grr, argh!" He whipped round and cowered away from himself, wringing his hands. "Eek! Please don't eat me, you ruggedly handsome creature of the night, you!" Spike drew himself upright and struck a noble pose. "It's your lucky day, little lady! Happens I'm off eating people; it upsets the missus. On your way!" Another volte face. "You mean you're not letting me go out of devotion to good for its own sake? You nasty vampire, get right back here and open a vein this minute!"

FACETIOUSNESS DOES NOT ADVANCE YOUR ARGUMENT.

"Yeh, well, it keeps me amused."

YOU LEFT YOUR COMPANION TO SAVE ANOTHER. WHY?

"Bloody hell, I don't know! Because..." Because why? He hadn't thought about it, he'd just done it. Man U's tragic defeat by West Ham (honestly now, West Ham?) sending him barmy? Some kind of conditioned reflex? "Because it's the... the thing the Slayer'd want me to do."

The searchlight intensity of the Harrier's regard sliced scalpel-sharp through heart and mind, weighing all it found on scales infinitely precise. Weirdly insignificant moments drifted up from the vaults of memory: _Dragging Dru away from the Crawford Street mansion, feeling a twinge of concern -_He's going to kill her. (Then he shrugged it off, and beat it out of town.) _Pouring out his sorrows to Joyce, and leaping to her defense when Angel startled her_. (Then Buffy showed up and things went downhill.) _Xander, standing in front of the ghost-infested Lowell House, asking_ Who's with me? _I am._ (Then he talked himself out of it.) _Lisa, in the park, flinging her arms around him and sobbing in relief..._

There was a note of surprise in the Harrier's voice when it spoke again. CREATURE OF DARKNESS, YOU ARE... TAINTED. IMPURE.

Whatever primal awe had struck him at the Harrier's appearance was wearing off fast. "I can't bloody well please any of you lot, can I?" Spike snapped. What did it matter what this jumped-up Christmas tree topper thought of him? "Not bad enough here, not good enough there--blow me a tune I don't know, Gabriel." Not as if he'd expected a pat on the head from a representative of the Powers, any more than he'd expected Harris to jump for joy at the news Buffy was giving him a tumble, and it didn't sting either, not a bit. What had he expected, wide-eyed astonishment and 'Well, Spike old man, aren't you extraordinary? Evil as the day is long, but doesn't the white hat look dashing?'

It paused, almost... uncertain? INTERESTING. The Harrier stood quiescent for a moment, considering, then swelled like a startled cat, shedding sunbeams. It gave vent to a long-drawn hiss. IF THE SLAYER CLAIMS YOU AS AN ALLY, THEN THE SOURCE OF THE IMBALANCE THAT DREW ME HERE--

Behind them, from her vantage point on the Rambler, Willow's chant reached its climax. Raw black-violet flame arced across the alarm-filled air. A multi-hued, inhuman scream rose from the Harrier demon, and all its light and flame turned in upon itself, imploding in darkness. With a wail of agony it turned tail and dove back into the tunnels, trailing streamers of glowing fluid that writhed in the air for minutes before fading away. Willow sat down on the fender of the Rambler with a thump and a small grin. "Don't know my own strength."

Spike eyed Willow. Witch'd never said a truer word. "Guess we didn't need the bazooka after all."

Buffy dropped her end of their improvised lance and bent over the edge of the pit. "Wills--that was amazing, but it was about to--we almost found out--we were _talking_ to it!"

Willow looked puzzled. "Yeah, I saw. Good job keeping it occupied, guys!"

Buffy's lips thinned in frustration, and she leaned into Spike's side. Spike wrapped an arm and the somewhat tattered remnants of his duster around Buffy's shoulders as a couple of police officers came trotting up bearing rolls of yellow tape, and together they allowed Sunnydale's finest to shoo them away. One by one, behind them, the car alarms fell silent. As they made their way across the parking lot, Buffy shook her head and looked back at the pit. There was no sign of the Harrier. Softly enough that only Spike's ears could pick the words up against the ragged chorus of police radios, she whispered, "Oh, this isn't gonna look good on the permanent record."


	24. Chapter 24

By the time they left Xander and Anya's place, a fire truck and a brace of police cars had arrived on the scene, and the parking lot was alive with strobing red lights and the garble of police radios. At least the car alarms had been turned off. Several towering, husky firemen and a pair of officers were herding the bystanders away with soothing stories about gas mains and methane build-up and explosions which were all under control now and everyone please return to your homes.

So they'd done just that, Willow and Tara on foot, Buffy taking Spike up on his offer of a ride. Dawn had met them at the door, woken by the motorcycle's roar, and despite the lateness of the hour insisted upon exercising her rights as resident vampire medic to House Summers.

"Spike, sit down!" Dawn's voice, peremptory and commanding, echoed down the hall.

"Not until you let go the sewing kit, Hawkeye. Contrary to popular opinion, I do possess working nerve endings."

Buffy paused in the bathroom doorway and bit her lip to stifle a laugh. Spike was backed up against the laundry hamper, glaring at Dawn, a force to be reckoned with in pink flannel pajamas, who was facing him down with equal determination and an extremely large and deadly-looking needle strung with coarse thread. The counter by the sink was littered with bandages and adhesive tape and tubes of burn ointment. Buffy hadn't the heart to tell her sister that the ritual was probably pointless; Spike was immune to infections and healed even faster than she did--and a good thing, considering how prone he was to getting himself beaten to a pulp.

Still, Dawn obviously enjoyed fussing over Spike as much as Spike enjoyed being fussed over. Let them have their fun. Besides, though his face wasn't too bad--the duster had shielded it from the worst of the Harrier's light--the burns across the backs of his hands were all crusty and oozing in the center and dark angry red around the edges. The sight of them made something inside her squirm, despite knowing perfectly well that he'd taken far worse injuries in the past, and weathered them alone and helpless... maybe Spike was due a little pampering.

"Come on, Spike, you do too need stitches!" Dawn was deep into stubborn mode, hands on hips and lips pressed together. "Your guts are practically hanging out. You could get--" She cast about for something sufficiently dire. "Peritonitis! I've been reading up on this. I think I want to go to medical school."

"Consider your dedication to humanity commended, Snack-size," Spike interrupted, "but, in case you hadn't noticed, somewhat inhuman here, and I don't recall volunteering to be your personal experimental cadaver. No stitches without brandy. Lots and lots of brandy."

Dawn's eyes narrowed. "It's for your own good. Buffy, tell him to--"

Buffy bent and gave the long gash across the rippling musculature of Spike's stomach a cursory examination. The crimson furrow intersected the white-on-white traces of half a dozen older scars, oozing a sluggish trickle of red where Dawn's cleaning the clotted blood away had opened it up again. _Someday we'll have to compare sexy wounds_. The Harrier's blades had parted pale skin and underlying tissue with laser-like precision--deep, but it hadn't quite penetrated the layer of muscle. "Sorry, Dawn. Distinct lack of visible guts. Have to vote with the vampire minority here." She snatched up Spike's shirt, currently wadded up on the counter, and headed out into the hall.

"Love, you don't need to--" Spike made as if to follow her out, only to be blocked by Dawn. He stuck his head out into the hall and yelled after her, "Oi! I need that!"

"Oh, come on, live dangerously! Wear a nice plaid!" Buffy yelled back, waving the shredded t-shirt at him. Honestly, you wouldn't think an immortal would get so attached to clothes, especially a t-shirt that was one of a set of a dozen clone-brothers. Entering the kitchen, she turned on the cold water in the sink and dumped the shirt in--it was a complete loss; the Harrier's blades had left it in tatters all across the front, but if there was one thing she'd learned in her career as Slayer it was that throwing away bloodsoaked rags was an invitation to trouble. People always took it the wrong way.

She watched the blood swirl Psycho-style down the drain and wondered idly what police forensics would make of it. _Victim has been dead approximately a hundred and twenty years, and really likes garlic wings_ . She sluiced the shirt under the faucet and frowned; there was something off about the weight of it. Something in the pocket--whatever it was Spike had been trying to hide last week? Her questing fingers met chill metal amidst the wet folds of cloth. Cigarette case? No...

Half an hour later, Dawn had reluctantly downgraded her plans from major surgery to first aid, and shuffled yawning back to bed. Buffy had traded her own worse-for-wear clothes for a white terrycloth robe and retired to her room to recline on her bed, legs crossed demurely at the ankles and the copy of Fitzgerald Spike'd given her propped open in her lap. She left the door ajar--an open invitation, if someone chose to accept it.

Spike materialized in the doorway, his duster thrown over his shoulders and his alabaster skin gleaming in the lamplight--a slightly shopworn angel with shabby black leather wings. He was sporting a neatly taped bandage around his lean middle, and both hands were swathed in gauze and redolent of burn ointment. He propped an elbow against the doorframe in a stiff parody of his usual grace, wincing a little as the motion pulled at his wound, and looked around the room uneasily. "Er... where'd you put my shirt, pet?"

Buffy assumed a big, perky, helpful-girlfriend smile. "That old thing? I tossed it."

An expression of mild panic crossed Spike's face. "You didn't--" He stopped. Noticed the pair of old-fashioned wire-rimmed spectacles in her hand. Closed his mouth with a snap. Buffy held the glasses up, dangling them from her fingers by one earpiece. "Looking for these, Master William?"

"Oh, bloody hell," Spike growled, stalking over to the bed and snatching the glasses. Buffy giggled and scooted over, patting the mattress, and he dropped down beside her with a disgusted snort, examining the lenses for damage.

"I found them in your shirt pocket when I was rinsing the blood out. You really are out a shirt, by the way, unless the ventilated look is in among the fangy set. What are they for? I mean, the trophy coat is squicky yet understandable, but trophy glasses? We're getting a little fetishy here."

"No." Spike held the glasses up to the light, drew a deep breath, scrunched up his face as if he were expecting a firing squad to open up at any moment, and slipped them on. "They're mine."

"No way!" Buffy sat up and got onto her hands and knees, peering into his eyes. "You need glasses?" She'd run into vampires who wore glasses before--that librarian guy for one--but Spike? Glasses were the antithesis of Spike. Giles-y and bookish and definitely un-hot. Except... except when they were perched on that aquiline nose, emphasizing the arch of those incredible cheekbones and the depth of those luminous blue eyes and providing a scholarly counterpoint to tousled platinum hair and all those lean ropy muscles... "Uh." _Oh, God, he's hot. Indiana Jones hot_. Buffy realized her mouth was hanging open and closed it before her tongue could loll out. "I mean, you need glasses. You really, really need glasses. What happened to superior vampire eyesight?"

Spike looked testy. "Brilliant for spotting a moving target at five hundred feet in the dead of night. Doesn't do bugger all for your ability to read fine print. And I don't _need_ glasses. Dalton, he _needed_ glasses; blind as a bat he was. I'm just a touch far-sighted. Do fine without 'em." He folded his arms across his chest--definitely sulking now. "Dunno why you're so surprised. Cecily didn't give you the full and pathetic run-down on the life and times of old William?"

Buffy clamped her lips down on a smile and settled down at his side again. When Spike started talking about William in the third person it generally meant his ego wanted soothing. "Cecily lost me somewhere around the point your Aunt Letitia lost her husband."

"Good place for it. Auntie was a miserable old bat. Uncle Charles was well out of it."

She had to ask. She wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she had to ask. "Did you kill them?"

Spike cocked his head. Spike-head-tilt with glasses was possibly even more meltworthy than without. "Could you be a bit more specific, love?"

"Your family. After you got turned. Did you--"

His breath escaped in a hiss of leashed annoyance. "Dad died when I was fifteen, and my Mum..." Back to being William in the first person, Buffy noted. "Yeh, I killed her. But not for joy of it, you understand that!" He swallowed hard. "Sickly, she was, when I died. TB. What we called consumption then. I thought--I thought I could make her like me. Save her." She should be horrified. She was horrified. But there was such anguish in his voice-- "It didn't end well. Main reason I've never been keen on siring anyone since." His eyes glinted behind the oval lenses, lost in time and distance for a minute; then the glint went vicious. "Ask about the wankers at that party and it won't be such a touching story. That's one bit my official Council biography's got right."

"Party?" Obviously Cecily had been just about to get to the good stuff. She was still trying to digest the concept of Spike's mother as a sweet little old lady vampire.

"The one I went to on the night I died." Spike was watching her as he always did when he laid the horrors of his past out on the table for her, measured regard in his ice-blue eyes--would this be the confession that sent her packing? "Didn't go well. A week later I earned my nickname right and proper. Railroad spike through the head, nice and slow. One after the other. Among other amusements. Roger last, so he could see what was coming to him. He'd screamed his throat bloody by the time he died. Angelus was proud of me." A wry twitch of his lips. "First and last time, I think."

"Oh." She swallowed the bile in the back of her throat--not at the description of the carnage, but at the dreamy satisfaction in his voice as he described it. "You know, I keep thinking we've done this part. You tell me something awful, I react with shock and horror--and it never gets any easier, hearing this stuff."

His eyes were drinking in her face as if every nuance of her expression was his life's blood. Anger, horror, even revulsion he'd take in stride; it was her contempt that would break him. Buffy's fingers closed pre-emptively over his forearm, feeling the quiver of muscles even through the leather. "Which is good, I think. The day I start treating Spike's Tales From The Crypt like a Sam Raimi movie is the day Ward starts worrying about the Buffy."

Spike looked down at the five small fingers making half-moon indentations in the leather of his sleeve. "Did you know, I've told you the story of my life a hundred times?" Without meeting her eyes he reached over and enveloped her hand in his, turned it over, his thumb caressing the lines of her palm. He took nothing for granted with her. Probably better he should--she was still in the business of killing his kind, after all. How many times would they repeat this ritual in their lives? "Over the summer. Every pathetic detail. Tried telling you all different ways. Always came down to a bourgeois git with delusions of social grandeur and a portmanteau full of bad verse." A bitter smile chased across his face and was gone. "Sometimes it's a bloody sight easier to talk to you when you're not really here to listen. And then I'd get past the story of my life and into the story of my death, and it'd hit me after a while... I haven't done anything. I came, I saw, I killed--story of my unlife. That's what I am--what I'm here for. I'm a killer. Creature of sodding darkness. Ought to be enough, oughtn't it?" There were hairline cracks in his voice. "There shouldn't be this... this wanting more, like I was still that poncy little twit I got shut of a hundred and twenty years ago." His canines sharpened and his eyes went golden for a second. "I got more, didn't I? So why's it not enough anymore?"

"I don't know." Buffy laid her head on his shoulder, the scuffed and battered leather cool beneath her cheek, and felt the tension in his body start to ease, fiber by fiber. "But I'm glad it's not. A pretty smart guy I know told me once that just because I was a killer, that didn't mean that a killer was all I was."

Spike's arm shifted to accommodate her weight, curling round her waist. She felt his intake of breath, his chest rising and falling in perfect unison with hers, the cool, supple, inhuman vitality of his body against her own. This close, his angelic face and Elgin marble body revealed subtle flaws: the ghostly fretwork of old scars that even vampire healing left as evidence of battles lost and won, the netted laugh-lines at the corners of his eyes, the nicotine stains on his fingers (but not his teeth; did going fangy and back again get rid of them? Or did he just use a good toothpaste?) No pure, cold, Anne Rice marble perfection, this undeath of his--a body that, however strong and fast and impervious to damage it might be, still got hungry and hurt and horny, needed exercising and shaving and flossing between the fangs. Somehow the imperfections just made him more achingly beautiful--knowing as she did that she'd put some of the lines on that ageless face.

"I want to hear it, Spike--the story of your life, I mean. From you. And the Tales From the Crypt? I need to hear this stuff. Angel and I--we never talked about... what he did, not really. I thought it wasn't important--he had a soul, you know? Why would I need to know all that icky old stuff that would never come up again?" She managed a laugh of sorts. "And I'm not a very talky person. You may have noticed."

"I've gotten the suspicion off and on." Spike dropped his head with that look which meant he'd have been blushing if he were still capable of it. "Not a lot to tell about my human life, really. And dull enough it can wait until you're not already about to fall asleep." He shifted uncomfortably, stuck one gauze-swathed hand through a Harrier-made slit in the front panel of his duster and wriggled his fingers. "Getting to be more hole than coat. P'raps I can get Will to waste a bit of the old mojo fixing it up. Though I'd've thought she'd be less apt to waste it after running out the once."

Buffy allowed the change of subject without comment. "She seems to have a lot to waste." Willow's mysteriously-restored magic nagged at her; things that seemed too good to be true usually were. She debated telling Spike of Tara's fears that Willow would never recover her magic, but Tara'd given her that information in confidence. "Just let Wills hold it together until tomorrow night, that's all I ask." She began playing with the lapel of his duster, curling the point up and unrolling it again. "I know I wasn't making with the master plans out there tonight, but I wish she hadn't zapped that thing. We could have found out more." Her fingers brushed across his bandaged stomach in a tentative caress. "You gonna be in shape to not hit people tomorrow night?"

"Yeh, I'll be there." Impossibly firm muscles tensed and relaxed again under her touch and Spike looked down at himself. "Didn't even feel it at first. Sodding things were so sharp I could have lost my head and never dusted for not noticing."

"It was willing to kill Xander to get to Anya." Buffy nibbled on her lower lip. "So the extra credit question is, is it coming back, and is it bringing friends? Are we positive this was one of the good guys?"

Spike's cheeks hollowed, and he pulled his lighter out of the duster pocket and played with it for a moment before stuffing it back in. "It'll be back. Thing about demons, pet, good or bad... we're not complicated. We've got a job and we do it, and it doesn't much matter what's in the way." One corner of that expressive mouth quirked. "'S one reason the pure ones can't stand us vamps. Too much humanity left in the worst of us, all those petty desires and conflicting emotions--affection and jealousy..." He laughed, short and sharp, and pressed his free hand to his midriff. "You ever stop to think, pet, that pure good's got as little use for mercy as pure evil? What could a bloke who never does wrong ever understand of we poor sods who do?"

Buffy winced as if it were she whose gut had been sliced open. _Faith, staring at her with pain-filled eyes. "You got no idea what it's like on the other side..."_ Even when he wasn't trying, Spike threw up unpleasant truths like stones from a plowshare. It struck her that she'd already made the choice she'd been pondering earlier in the evening, walked through Door Number Two without a glance at the curtain where Carol Merrill was standing now. This was becoming the heart of her life, these moments alone with Spike, bathed in the glow of candles or the harsher illumination of tungsten filaments. She could be the Slayer alone, but this was what allowed her to be Buffy, gave her strength to battle the league of mundane foes that awaited her outside the boundaries of their charmed circle. "Tonight, with the car? That was...I don't want to say this like I'm giving you Snausages or something, but--you did good, Spike. I was proud of you. Well, except for the axe thing, that could have used some work."

His hand sifted through her hair, honey-dark against the white of the gauze, twining the tawny locks around his pale fingers. He smiled, a self-deprecating light in his eyes. "Ah, the heroism bit. Well, pet, I know you get off on it. Even when you're supposed to be on strike."

"Well, yeah." With some effort she kept the smile from her lips. "Suppose you're telling me you don't? How many of my kind have you saved, Spike?"

He pulled back, deep suspicion in his eyes, shoved his glasses higher on his nose and stared at her. "Would the answer be 'Not enough?'" he asked.

Buffy nodded. Oh, he so deserved this. "Mmhmm. And they just keep coming, don't they? And some part of you wants it. Not only to make me happy--but because you're just a little bit in love with it."

Spike jolted back against the white-iron curlicues of the headboard with the look of a man upon whom a horrid and seductive truth had been sprung. _Payback, Spikey!_ He blinked, momentarily speechless, then sputtered, "You incredible bitch, how long have you been waiting to say that?"

She smirked, slipping her hand beneath the duster and splaying the fingers over his silent heart. "Awhile."

His eyes had the most incredible expression, regret holding wonder at bay. "Not like I cared deeply about _ her,_ love. Don't give me credit I'm not due."

How carefully she had to pick her words. "No... but you cared about saving her. It's something."

Spike snorted. "It's perverted."

Turning in the circle of his arm, she raised her hand to his cheek, tracing strong bones and the sandpaper roughness along his jaw--incipient 5:00 AM shadow. "So you're perverted. I like my vampires a little kinky that way, you know?"

Lips met parted lips, warm and cool together, touching, tasting--so soft for such a hard man, that luscious mouth of his. Spike nuzzled along her jawline, nipping at her earlobe. "How about other ways?"

"Out of curiosity, do you ever think of anything but sex?"

"Not while you're around." He cupped the impressive bulge in his jeans with his free hand and leered at her. "Nurse Buffy, I've got a swelling. Wanna kiss it better?"

Buffy poked him in the stomach. Spike yelped, but if anything it appeared to increase his enthusiasm. "Do _not_ tell me this is the fun kind of pain."

He didn't laugh--probably it would have hurt in the non-fun way--but his eyes were dancing. "Nah, but it could lead to the fun kind." His hand cupped her breast, cool confident fingers kneading the soft flesh before giving her already-alert nipple a firm pinch. The hand dropped away and she yearned after it, all tingly-warm, calling his fingers back to tweak and tease. Spike callously ignored her imperious little whimper and reached for the book lying on the coverlet beside them. He flipped it open, cleared his throat, and began to read-- not, for once, squinting and holding it at arm's length.  


> I sent my Soul through the Invisible,  
> Some letter of that After-life to spell  
> And by and by my Soul return'd to me,  
> And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell" 

She listened, happily mesmerized. He could get her off with that voice alone, rich and rolling, raspy with a century's worth of too much booze and too many cigarettes.  


> Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,  
> And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,  
> Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,  
> So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.

Buffy reminded herself that Dawn was asleep just down the hall, and Willow and Tara might get home and walk upstairs at any minute, and letting her hand wander down to Spike's fly was just asking for trouble. She'd always been a troublemaker. _God_ he looked hot in those stupid glasses. Oops, there went the buttons. No wonder, with the kind of pressure they were under, day in, day out, poor things, set the impossible task of restraining not-so-little Spike, ready to stand up and do his duty for Slayer and country. Wasn't three hours of sex in a day enough for anyone? Obviously not. H_ow many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Let's find out! One, two, oh, way more than three..._

Spike started to take his glasses off and set them on the nightstand, but Buffy reached up and laid a hand on his arm. "Leave them on, William." As her golden head descended upon him once more, Spike leaned back on the pillows with a happy groan and a grateful wonder in his eyes, as if she'd given him an unexpected gift. She looked up one last time, eyes sparkling. "And keep reading."

*****

Dawn Summers sat at the kitchen table, drawing figure eights with her spoon in her cereal and trying to decide exactly how pissed off she was at her sister. Not allowed to sit in on the summoning. Not allowed to go to Anya's shower. Buffy was totally over-reacting to the shoplifting thing. It was bad enough that she was persona non grata in Sunnydale Mall; grounding her from everywhere else was beyond the pale.

Not pissed off enough to tell Mrs. Kroger that Buffy was dating a guy who thought he was a vampire--no, that would be going entirely too far, and get Spike in trouble. On the other hand, that edifying scene she'd caught a glimpse of through the crack of Buffy's bedroom door, before Buffy had slammed it behind her in their morning race for the bathroom--Spike, dead asleep with a sated smile on his face, wrists still lashed securely to the iron headboard with what looked suspiciously like a pair of her sister's underwear--that had possibilities.

Not that she'd actually tell The Kroger that Buffy was engaging in bondage fun with a vampire (or anyone else) a mere twenty or thirty feet from her impressionable younger sister. That way lay a one-way bus ticket to L.A., and Joyce Summers hadn't raised any dumb children. But letting Buffy think she might was another matter.

In the midst of her internal debate, Spike ambled into the kitchen, decked out in mostly-buttoned jeans and little else, all sleepy purry stretches and bed-head. Someone needed to explain to Buffy that cleaning out a drawer for her demon lover wasn't particularly productive if he wasn't given the opportunity to put anything in it. Dawn studied him critically; if the way he was moving was any indication, the gash across his stomach was healing nicely beneath the bandages. Move over, Noah Wyle.

"Hullo, Bit." Spike wandered over to the refrigerator, ran a hand through his unruly hair, and hung on the door, gazing into its depths as if he could read omens in the disposition of leftovers. "You look peaked." An uneasy thought appeared to strike him. "Didn't keep you up, did we?"

"No." Dawn weighed the decorative advantages of a shirtless Spike wandering around the house against the disadvantages of having to fight someone even more hair-obsessed than Buffy for the bathroom of mornings. Tough decision. "Mrs. Kroger's coming over after school and I have to sit through the big Shoplifting Is A Cry For Help speech. It's like, I've got it already, okay? Stealing's bad. I'm not gonna do it again. So what's their damage? My language comprehension's at college level, they have no clue what my life's like, and getting all Grover and Ernie to explain to me how I _feel_ is the height of lamitude."

"So far as authority's concerned, it's not enough you don't repeat your sins--you've got to suffer for 'em. Hence the lecture." Spike pulled out the remains of the experimental macaroni-hotdog casserole and sniffed at it. His eyes lit up. "Curry?"

Dawn nodded. "And ketchup. Gives it kick." She started to scowl at her cereal, reconsidered and turned on the puppy eyes instead. Spike was a sucker for the puppy eyes. "I did suffer. Still suffering. Big time, paper bag on the head suffering."

Spike set the casserole dish on the kitchen island, fetched a spoon from the silverware drawer and dug in. (Spike was, Dawn often felt, the only person she knew who had any sense of culinary adventure.) "Wankers, the lot of them, but--" He gestured with the spoon between bites. "Wages of getting caught, Pidge. Fair cop, innit?"

Dawn rolled her eyes. "Yes, Mr. Undead Citizen Of The Month."

"Next time you'll know better."

She shot him a conspiratorial grin. "Not to get caught?"

Spike winked at her and laughed. "Got it in one. Look, pet, been thinking about it, what aside from nicking stuff might give you that feeling you're looking for..."

He had? "I can't wait to hear this one."

"...and doing a naff job of it since most of what I come up with I'd have to use your guts for guitar strings if you tried it and flense anyone you tried it with--but there's always killing things to cheer a chap up on a rainy day. Could show you a few moves. If I can talk your sis into it, anyway. You're old enough to kick a little arse, and it's not like I could hurt you by accident."

Did that mean what she thought it meant? An entry into the elite Scooby patrolling circle? Self-defense lessons beyond what she could scrounge spying on Buffy's training sessions? Realizing that a delighted squeak wasn't exactly the reaction of a mature woman of the world, Dawn repressed her impulse to bounce up and down in her seat. Cool, calm, collected. A second later she burst out, "Omigod, that would be _so cool!_ Can you teach me that thing where you just go _snap_\--" She demonstrated graphically with both hands-- "and break their necks like a stale Dorito?"

"Absolutely!" Spike paused, visibly reconsidering. "Er, well, p'raps not right off. Not a big supply of necks to practice on, once we've used up Harris. But eye gouges, kicks in the balls, that sort of thing..."

"Spike, you are so great!" Dawn leaped out of her chair, sending it screeching across the kitchen floor, and gave him an enthusiastic hug. Trepidation hit her like a cold wave. "Buffy's not gonna go for it. She's going to think it's too much fun or something--she even grounded me from Anya's dumb old wedding shower!"

"Let me handle your sis." Spike smoothed Dawn's hair away from her face affectionately and his expression went serious. "But you've got to give me something to work with, Platelet. That means no larking about or having The Kroger on. Nod 'n smile and pretend like they've nailed your psyche to the wall with darts of incisive analysis, even if they're spouting utter bollocks."

Dawn nodded vigorously. "Got it. I'll be _so_ non-recidivism girl. Buffy will think I've been replaced by Pod Dawn." She would have pressed for further details of the neck-breaking thing and possible demonstrations, but at that juncture Willow and Tara appeared, juggling backpacks and overflowing book bags, and the kitchen erupted into the normal chaos of House Summers on a school morning. Dawn flung herself back into her chair, twining her feet around the legs to defend her claim in the face of potential squatters.

"Are we completely out of orange juice?" Willow asked, ducking under Tara's arm and burrowing into the terra incognita of the vegetable drawer. "And what happened to my Raisinettes? Did Hurricane Buffy blow through on a post-slay binge again, because they most definitely said 'Willow' right on the box, and--"

"Might have been Spike," Dawn pointed out, excessively helpful. "He eats like a horse too." Spike looked affronted, but as his mouth was full, any attempts at a snappy comeback were momentarily thwarted.

"Check behind the milk," Tara advised, stuffing a handful of granola bars into her bag. "Dawnie, do you have a ride, or--"

"There's nothing behind the milk but pig's blood. Oh, wait, here they are. But no OJ, and a day without orange juice--"

Spike perked up. "Hand that out, would you, pet?"

"Yeah. Megan's mom's picking me up." Mrs. Kendall, fortunately, had not gone into overprotective parental meltdown over The Incident, probably because Megan hadn't been involved, for once--or maybe having an elder daughter currently sporting lumpies and fangs made her a kinder, more tolerant person where merely human peccadilloes were concerned. Yeah, right.

"--is the kind of day we get until the next Social Security check arrives." Buffy came trotting down the stairs in full war paint and Office Drag, fixing her conservative gold stud earrings and displaying every sign of pre-interview jitters. "And don't _even_ say it; I didn't have enough money with me when I stopped by the store to get everything on the list. I had to leave the Minute Maid melting in the magazine rack on the way to the checkout. I'm never going to be able to show my face in the frozen goods aisle again." She turned and fixed a gimlet eye on Spike, who was in the process of reaching over Willow's shoulder for the pig's blood. "How much of that stuff do you drink a day, anyway?"

Spike froze with the carton half-way to his lips, looking alarmed, faintly guilty, and puzzled as to what exactly he had to be guilty about. "Two pints, give or take," he said cautiously. "Sometimes three. More if I'm mending."

Buffy said "Hmm," in the disapproving tone she used for any subject connected with The Budget, the one that made Dawn feel like a traitor for shooting up three or four inches in the past year and thus taking up valuable space, food, and new clothing. "If you're going to be over here twenty-four hours a day, I've got to plan for it. You're not going to be living solely on Dawn's radioactive mutant leftovers."

Spike fished around in his back pocket, pulled out a handful of crumpled bills, and laid them on the countertop. "Blood and orange juice all round. Knock yourselves out."

Tara gave him a grateful smile. "Thanks--we can stop by the store on the way back from--"

Buffy grabbed Tara's wrist before she could take the money. "You know we can't take that, Spike."

"We can't?" Tara asked. "Why? It's not counterfeit." She picked up one of the bills and examined it. "Is it?"

Spike's jaw set in concrete. "Not asking you to support me, Slayer."

Buffy's eyes went slitty. "I have no intention of supporting you, but I'm not taking your money, and you know perfectly well why."

A deep throaty growl and a burst of vampire speed put the two of them were nose to nose. "No woman of mine's going to be put out keeping me in blood and beers--that's the bloke's job--"

Behold the male ego in its natural habitat. Dawn hid a grin behind her hand as icicles formed in her sister's eyes. _Way to go with the convinciness, Spike_. "That would be 'job' as in 'bank job?'" Buffy asked sweetly. "I'd rather be put out than put away."

There was a knock at the kitchen door, and Lisa peered cautiously through the blinds. Dawn stood up, scooped up the last few spoonfuls of cereal and reached for the door, mindful not to open it far enough to let the morning sun in. "Lise! Does your mom know--"

"Hey, maybe I could do a water to blood spell or something," Willow said, eyes lighting up at the prospect of magical usefulness like Spike's at the scent of curry. "Or water to orange juice. We'd never have to shop again." Tara, who'd taken advantage of Buffy's distraction to slip Spike's money into the petty cash cookie jar, shook her head and made a throat-cutting gesture.

"No, I didn't tell her we were getting you," Lisa whispered. She looked nervously around, expecting hidden cameras, perhaps. "She just thinks I'm riding with Megan." She inched one hand through the door and held out a square envelope with a wreath sticker on it. "I just wanted to drop this off for..."

"If you really want to make yourself useful, Will, magic me up a tunnel from the basement to the sewers. It's bloody annoying making a mad dash for the nearest manhole."

"Really? I could--"

"NO!" Buffy and Tara shouted at once, as Willow raised a casual hand and an ominous underground rumble shook the house on its foundations. Spike, looking rather shaken himself, mouthed "Joking!" at Willow.

Megan's pert and over-mascara'd face appeared below Lisa's in the gap of the door. "Dawn? Was that, like, an earthquake? Are you--" She caught sight of Spike. "Oh. My. GOD!"

"I can get you a mop to go with that tongue, if you want," Dawn said acidly. "The floor needs washing." She took the card from Lisa and handed it over to Spike.

"Look, Slayer, if you won't let me look after you, at least let me look after myself!" Spike and Buffy looked to be a hair away from either kissing or punching each other, having taken their argument from zero to sixty in five seconds flat. Spike diverted his attention from the Slayer stare-down for a second to give the card a puzzled look, which he then turned on Lisa.

"It's a Christmas card," Lisa squeaked. "Because of saving my life and all."

Spike looked from Lisa to the card and back again, a little startled, and, Dawn suspected, far more pleased than he was about to let on. After an awkward silence he nodded. "Thanks."

Out at the curb Mrs. Kendall was honking her horn for them to hurry. Lisa gave Spike a watery smile and ducked out. Megan remained in the doorway, gazing at Spike with the adoration she usually reserved for guys with staples in their navels, until Dawn shoved her bodily out into the driveway. Willow and Tara followed them out, arguing earnestly over whether or not an off-the-cuff tunnel spell would have resulted in the sewer backing up into the Summers' basement, and set off down the street towards the bus stop, book bags banging at their sides.

"How do you _live_ in that _house_ and not, like, absolutely _die?" _ Megan asked.

Did Megan absolutely _ have_ to undermine her noble resolve at every opportunity? Dawn gave the eye-roll another workout. "It's a constant struggle. Geez, Megan, he's not only my sister's boyfriend, he's _your_ sister's ex. Generational issues much? Plus, smoker. He probably kisses like sucking an ashtray."

Megan tossed her hair and giggled. "Ooh. So maybe I should take up smoking. With one of those, you know, long holder thingies?"

Dawn reflected cheerfully as they trotted down the driveway that soon she'd know how to snap Megan's neck like a stale Dorito. Not that she would; that, she reminded herself with a pious giggle, would be wrong. But it was sure fun to think about. Spike might be right about the rainy day thing after all.

*****

"Did she buy it?" Buffy stood on tiptoe at the kitchen window, pulled the curtains back and pressed her nose to the pane, craning to see the curb where Dawn was sliding into the back seat of the Kendalls' Aerostar. Radiant bars of sunlight striped her face like Harrier's blood and made a corona of her hair, pricking out every errant strand in molten gold. He didn't miss the sun much for himself, but he loved to see her limned in fire like this. His battle maiden. _Pick me, Chooser of the Slain._

"Hook, line and sinker." Spike pulled a clean bowl out of the cupboard, rummaged around through the three or four half-full boxes of cereal on top of the fridge for the revoltingly healthy and vitamin-enhanced one Buffy claimed to favor, and filled it to overflowing. "Now I'll convince you, you'll give grudging permission, and Bob's your uncle. Here, stop flitting about and eat." He appropriated a chair and dropped into it, slid down on his tailbone, and took a gulp of his blood. "We'll have to be careful, pet--the Bit's smarter than the two of us put together, and if she suspects we're playing her instead of her playing us--"

"Hellmouth hath no fury. Right." Buffy let the curtain fall back and stepped away from the window, diminishing in two paces from Valkyrie to potential office help. This wasn't his Slayer, this buttoned-down mouse in the sensible shoes and the skirt of old-lady grey--not the warrior, not the woman. It ate at him to see her like this, all her fire damped in the service of fitting in. Buffy Summers should never have to fit in; she should be sashaying through the world in designer clothes and deigning to allow it to conform to her whims.

She strolled over to his chair, spun round and dropped down on his knee. Against him was one place she fit in perfectly. Both hands came to rest on his shoulders and worked down his chest, massaging his pectorals, fingers dancing across the ticklish spots on his ribs till he shivered. Her lips brushed his ear. The warmth of her breath took his away, and all the perfume and deodorant in the world couldn't wholly mask the rich musky female scent of her courses. His Slayer after all, beneath the clever disguise. "Now. Where were we?"

"Five seconds away from ravishing you on the kitchen table. Spikey wants his Slayer snacks." Spike ran a hand up her inner thigh until his fingers encountered a barrier, gratifyingly damp already. Nylons. Interesting texture, that, when circled against very sensitive skin just _so_. She melted against him, stormy eyes half-lidded and rosy lips half-parted, and he felt the surging pulse of her blood all around him as her hips arched into his. He pulled his hand away. "But eat your brekky first."

Buffy pouted and smacked him on the shoulder. "Jerk. I was going to skip breakfast. Anya said I was gaining weight." She pushed the cereal away.

Spike dragged it back. This was familiar territory, though Dru's refusal to eat had generally stemmed from illness, ennui, and a fear of invisible blood-dwelling giraffes infesting her liver. "Good. You could stand another five pounds." He gave her rump a cheerful slap, which, to his interest, did not set off the chip in the slightest. Possibilities there. "Eat up. Can't live on vampire jizz."

"Gack. Like I can eat anything with that image in my head." Nonetheless she curled all kitteny in his lap and let him pour milk for her and didn't argue until half the cereal was gone. For all her protests of independence, Buffy liked her cosseting once you talked her into it. A droplet of milk threatened to spill and her little pink tongue darted out to catch it, running over the smooth bowl of the spoon until it was clean enough to eat off of. Spike shifted to ease the pressure on certain delicate portions of his anatomy, and Buffy gave him a sly look from beneath her lashes and popped the whole spoon in her mouth. "Mmmmmmm," she said, withdrawing it with agonizing slowness. "I meant where we in the... discussion."

"Oh. That." He ran a fingernail along the back of her knee, enjoying the sensation of her ass wriggling against his crotch. "You were being completely unreasonable." His hand came up to trace the curve of her jaw with a finger, tipping her head up to meet his eyes, and he injected a coaxing note into his voice. "Love... can't you let me take care of you, just a little? I was good at that once, though you might not think it to look at me now. This chip's made half a man of me, but I could still do my bit if you'd let me."

Her fingers stilled on the button she'd been toying with, and she tore her eyes away from his, seeking refuge in the patterns of spilled cereal on the tabletop. "Spike... stop it. Please." She met his gaze again, the sunlight bringing out tawny flecks in the grey-green depths of those big beseeching eyes. Her warm little palms flattened to his chest, stroking the taut muscle. _ Beat me, whip me, rip my heart out and stomp on it--only keep touching me while you do so..._ "You don't know how tempting it is when you say things like that to--to just throw up my hands and fall into your arms and let you take care of it! I _hate_ living like this! I suck at money, and interviews, and--I've got to draw the line somewhere, Spike. Decide when I'm going to look the other way and when I'm going to bust your chops. Especially with this thing with Dawn. And until I can figure out something better, the line's at my threshold. Stolen goods, stolen money, and anything bought with stolen money, not invited."

"Swindled money all right?" Buffy banged her forehead into his chest with a groan. "Teasing, sweetling." He buried his nose in the shining mass of her hair, still warm from its passage through sunlight. It would save them all a great deal of aggravation if she'd give in, but he suspected that some small part of him, the part that connected, however briefly, with small Chinese girls intent on killing him, and took secret perverse pride in pulling complete strangers out of cars, would have been forever disappointed if she had. "But look here--if I come up with honest dosh, you'll have to take it, pet. No excuses. I'm yours. And I take care of the people I belong to."

"Deal." Far too quick and pat an agreement; didn't think that was a possibility, did she? The eldest Miss Summers was in for a surprise. William the Bloody was nothing if not stubborn. She went all serious on him then, as he'd gone on Dawn, bending her head to press kisses to his collarbone. "Spike--don't ever think that chip makes you half a man." Her voice muffled against his skin, the words vibrating from her lips and into his chest as if she would instill them directly into his heart. Buffy circled his waist with both arms, interlacing her fingers across his spine. "It forced you to find out how much more than a killer you are. It's why we're standing here. Sitting here. Whatever. Without it one of us would be dead by now, and not coming back. If Riley ever shows his face in Sunnydale again, I'm going to give him a big smooshy kiss." At his irate rumble Buffy looked up with an impish grin, the point of her chin digging into his chest. "All right. Just for you I'll make it a hearty handshake."

"Wear rubber gloves," Spike grumbled. "You don't know where he's been. About this grounding thing for Dawn, love, I think it's wearing on her. If..."

Buffy's hands immediately stopped the lovely things they were doing to his back muscles. She sat back and folded her arms, one eyebrow climbing for her hairline. "Spike..."

"What?" Comprehension dawned. "She's playing me, isn't she?"

"Like a trout. I just had the most horrible thought."

"Eh?"

"All those times I put one over on Mom--was I really putting one over on Mom?" She gave an exaggerated shudder. "That way lies getting drummed out of the rebellious teenagers union. I've gotta book; my interview's in half an hour. Do you want to hang here today?"

"For a bit, but I won't be here when you get back, most like. Things to do." He bestowed a kiss to her brow as she hopped off his lap. "I'll do the manhole dash and see you tonight." Buffy grabbed her purse and the car keys, gave her reflection a last spit-check in the side of the toaster, and dashed out the door. Spike sat at the kitchen table, deep in thought, finishing off his pig's blood and macaroni-hotdog surprise while the tame whine of the SUV's engine died away down the street. When the only thing audible outside was desultory birdsong, he went upstairs. Things to do, indeed.

A longer-than-really-necessary shower and a leisurely toss later, he wandered back into the bedroom. It was starting to look like a room again, very slowly--the single book on the bare shelf had been joined by a magazine or two, lipstick and eyeshadow and face cream jostled together on the dresser, and a Gettysburg of clothing lay strewn about the floor near the closet, victims of Buffy's compulsive search for the perfect outfit. She'd left the blinds drawn for him, and the room was dim and cavernous, still redolent of Buffy and blood and sex. Spike took a deep breath, all the way down to the bottom of his lungs, and held it: essence of Buffy to tide him over, at least until the next time he had to do something stupid like talk.

He wandered around the room for a minute, a deep thrumming growl of content rolling around inside as he picked up little bits of Buffy, examining them, setting them down. He imagined them migrating insensibly over to the crypt, a slow invasion of girly scents and textures trooping past a counter-invasion of Racing Forms, bottles of Guinness, scuffed up motorcycle boots and fugitive copies of Swinburne he'd deny owning. It pleased him, this image of their living spaces insinuating themselves into each other, a long-distance house-fuck. He prowled naked through the rest of the house room by room--a predator thing, leaving his mark in the subtle disarrangement of bric-a-brac in his wake. His territory, now, his pack, his pride in more ways than one.

At last he returned to Buffy's bedroom and pulled on his jeans and boots again. He started to grab his glasses from the nightstand, where they'd eventually ended up, and hesitated. Very good, falling asleep to her soft feminine snores and the lovely heat of her body wrapped around his. Infinitely better waking up to the painful-pleasant stretch of his arms still bound overhead, and the pressure of her warm little fingers closing possessively around his cock, which had woken well before he had. Not as good as waking up to her every morning, but before he could make that particular fantasy a reality, he was going to have to do something about Buffy's stubborn refusal to take anything from him. Until then... he folded the glasses carefully, got up and put them in the empty dresser drawer, a placeholder for things to follow.

He picked up his duster from the bed and shrugged into it. Damned if he'd let her support him. He had his pride back again, and seeing as it was she who'd resurrected it from the ashes, she could bloody well deal with the consequences. Spike galloped downstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Home, and then for a sewer-crawl; if possible, he wanted to retrieve the trank gun. Vague plans which had been bubbling since L.A. were beginning to coalesce into something which might actually be a good idea.

There was a first time for everything.


	25. Chapter 25

"It was very romantic." Anya's feather duster skirmished over the shelves of the display case, front-line troops in the endless war against grime. "Also quite annoying. One would think he'd given a little bit of thought--just a little bit, I don't ask for miracles--to the demon aspect before this. I certainly spent numerous sleepless nights obsessing about the fact that as mortals we're both doomed to become extremely wrinkled and unattractive and then dead."

"Well, it is Xander," Giles pointed out. "One might think, but Xander is not one." He closed the diary of Albert Venn (Watcher of Luanne Scoggins, Lafayette, Louisiana, Called 1931, died 1937 of mysterious causes after an illicit affair with a local boccor), sat back, and gazed at the lettering on the slender volume's spine, his thumb denting his lower lip. After a moment thus engaged, he set the journal down. He'd taken to carrying them with him, perhaps in superstitious hope of absorbing some critical scrap of information by osmosis. "Anya... have you any past experience with Slayers? Before meeting Buffy?"

The feather duster stilled, and Anya tucked a silver-blond tress behind one ear, a thoughtful frown creasing her brow. For once Giles agreed with Xander; the platinum hair didn't suit her. She'd looked much better as a brunette, her face framed in golden-brown waves which matched the rich grain of the wood shelving. Giles kept this observation to himself--knowing Anya, her hair would be russet or jet black by the wedding. She made a regretful noise and shook her head. "Not a lot. I granted a wish for one once, back in the fifteenth century, but that wasn't in her professional capacity." She brandished the feather duster at a particularly obstinate corner. "We tend to avoid them. Most Slayers have this 'See demon, kill demon' thing going on, and it's extremely annoying." At Giles's questioning expression, she elaborated, "Most demons won't have anything to do with vampires socially. It's not just dangerous when Slayers and you Watcher types lump us all up together, it's embarrassing."

Her expression said _What kind of ignoramus wouldn't know that?_ Very likely she was right. Every now and then, Anya's fierce devotion to human conformity slipped, and thousand-year-old eyes looked out of that twenty-year-old face and made him feel young and foolish. It was strangely invigorating. No wonder Xander was secretly terrified of this wedding--even stripped of her powers, how long could he really expect Anya to play compliant Samantha to his Darren? "I beg your pardon. Didn't you once date--"

Anya gave vent to an unladylike snort. "Oh, Dracula was a social climber. Besides, we vengeance demons aren't much higher than vampires on the social scale--we start out human, just like they do. But we're more powerful, and, of course, we have a union." She came around behind the counter, secured the feather duster in the cabinet under the register, planted both elbows on the counter and leaned forward to see what he was reading. "Why do you ask?"

The shop bell rang, and for some moments they were both distracted assembling the ingredients for a potency spell ("For a friend!") for the nervous little man who crept into the shop as if he were buying heroin on a street corner. "Many fewer side effects than Viagra," Anya assured him with a brilliant smile. "Most people don't even notice the discoloration. And I'm sure your friend's significant other will appreciate the numerous and prolonged orgasms." She shook her head as the man scurried out. "I'm sure one of those ingredients is an allergen. People get so red the moment they get near it."

"Fancy." Giles slipped his glasses back on, pulled out another journal and began leafing through the entries. "In these Watchers' diaries I've been studying, there are two distinct patterns: Slayers becoming rigidly controlled killing machines, and Slayers becoming wildly erratic." Another thoughtful adjustment of the glasses. "Every now and again, a case arises which appears in the official reports to fall into the latter category, but if one reads between the lines and squints a great deal..." Giles sighed and shook his head. "I had some faint hope that you might have a personal recollection of some of them. It would be extremely useful to have an outside perspective on some of these events."

He no longer entirely trusted his own. He'd grown too lax to be a Watcher, too wrapped up in Buffy's private joys and sorrows, and couldn't help reading them into the accounts of past Slayers. "Let me take a look," Anya said, reaching for the book. "Maybe something will jog my memory."

Giles handed her the journal of the moment and his notes on the other volumes. She scanned them quickly, a small murmur of recognition escaping her. "This one," she said, tapping one of the names on his list. "Maria Lupe. I wasn't involved, but I heard about it. She was having an affair with one of the were-jaguars. Quite a scandal."

"Are you certain? Her Watcher's account indicates that she died fighting jaguar spirits."

Anya closed the book; the pages came together with a crisp snap. "Of course I'm certain. I have an excellent memory for gossip; it's a professional asset. And it's not impossible. After all, Buffy's having sex with a vampire and she'll probably die fighting vampires."

"Must you remind me? Of either eventuality?" Giles ran his pen down the list--of the two dozen names he'd culled, over half fell into the erratic group, and of those, over two-thirds involved... inappropriate attachments of one sort or another. Not always romantic entanglements, either; there were alliances of one sort or another, which (reading between the lines and squinting a great deal) approached friendship. That surprised him far more than the romantic entanglements. Of course in any group of teen-aged girls, no matter how strictly trained and guarded, some would fall prey to their own hormones sooner or later. Of the cases where such entanglements were alluded to, only two of them involved a Slayer and a human male: the one with the boccor, and another with her own Watcher. The rest were a potpourri of the supernatural--jaguar spirits, vampires, selkies, werewolves...

_I can't resist your sinister attraction_ .

"Out of the mouths of babes and robots," Giles muttered. Certain Slayers were drawn to their mortal enemies in spite of rigid indoctrination to the contrary, as well as all common sense. He was beginning to make his own deductions as to why; surely other Watchers must have come to similar conclusions long ago, and struggled just as he was doing now to separate human caprice from possible demonic influence. The feeling nagged at him that he was re-inventing the wheel, but odds were good that Travers was waiting with bated breath for him to file a research request with the main Council library in London. The very fact that Giles had done so would tell Travers more than Giles wanted him to know.

But unlike most field Watchers, Rupert Giles had alternate sources of information available. "Anya... you have several of your former colleagues in town for the wedding, do you not?" She nodded. "Would any of them perhaps be willing to tell me as much as they can recall about past liaisons between Slayers and demons? Especially about any of these particular cases? And--is there any chance that D'Hoffryn has any information on the nature and origins of Slayers in the annals of Arashmahar?"

Anya's expression was both shrewd and admiring. "Possibly. He'll be here next week. He'll want compensation for any information he gives you, of course--I'll negotiate for you, if you like. I'm better at that than you are." Satisfaction sparked in her dark eyes, and she laid her hand lightly across the back of his. "I don't like the Council. They were extremely rude to you last year, and we lost a good two days' worth of business while they were puttering around with their silly tests and things for Buffy. They won't expect you to go to D'Hoffryn, will they?"

"I doubt it. In fact--"

Both of them jumped as the door to the basement slammed open. Spike stalked through the doorway, tranquilizer gun slung over one shoulder and his duster billowing behind him like an anime hero with his own private wind machine. A stormcloud bruise bloomed across one razor-edged cheekbone, and his clothes were splattered with a sticky tracery of violet ichor. He marched straight up to the counter and dumped a squirming mass of mauve tentacles tipped with marble-sized, gooseberry-green orbs onto the blotter by the cash register. "Got any more of these?"

"Scirivin eyes?" Anya eyed the... er... eyes hungrily. "No, none in stock at the moment. You should put those on ice. They're more potent if they're still twitching."

Spike propped himself on one elbow against the counter and crossed a booted foot over the opposing ankle. "Yeh, I know. You want some in stock?"

The avid delight in Anya's face was quickly masked by professional detachment. She picked up one of the quivering eyestalks and examined it. It writhed in her hand like a giant nightcrawler. "Hmmm... torn at the root, not severed cleanly... not the highest quality."

"Bollocks. You find someone who can make a Scirivin stand all prim and proper while they trim its eyestalks and you can buy from him."

Anya looked surprised. "You didn't kill it?"

"Fuck, no. Won't grow a new crop of wrigglies for next month's rent if I'm so gormless as to kill it, now will it?"

"You have a point." She pursed her lips, poking at the remaining eyestalks with a felt-tip pen to assure herself that all of them were still twitching. "Flat fee or on commission?"

"Flat, for now. I need the blunt."

"Twenty dollars apiece?"

"Fine, whatever."

"Spike, you're supposed to _haggle_." Anya sounded almost offended as she opened the cash drawer and started counting out twenties--all neatly sorted so that they faced the right way. "It's no fun if you don't haggle."

Spike's grin was lupine. "Lurin' you in, pet. Flat fee now. Commission later. And a retainer."

Anya paused mid-count. "Retainer?"

"Yeh." He slapped the counter, making the eyestalks jump. "You want to sell demon bits; I can provide 'em fresh off the demon. And as I've such low overhead and we're such close friends engaging in cash transactions and all, cheaper than your out of town suppliers. 'N fact, you got a customer what wants something special in the way of scales and spines and dangly bits, I'll undertake to hunt it down." His eyes went hard. "Subject to a few restrictions. And if the Slayer asks, you'll certify--in writing, sodding well notarized if necessary--that anything I sell you's got at least one use that doesn't involve exploding eyeballs or extended painful death throes."

"I think that can be arranged." Anya handed Spike his money and a receipt, produced a plastic bag from beneath the counter, and gingerly swept the spaghetti-tangle of eyestalks into it. She knotted it neatly at the top and handed it back to Spike. "You can put that in the refrigeration unit in the basement on your way out. Your retainer's going to be purely nominal, of course--would fifty dollars a week do? And I'm thinking a five percent commission."

Spike reared back in outrage. "Nominal my lily white arse. Don't think you're going to impose on my good nature, Anyanka, just because you're easy on the eyes and I've a soft spot for birds with a talent for evisceration. The going rate for suppliers runs closer to five hundred a week. I done me some checking up before waltzing in here with your eyeball bouquet. And as for commissions--fifty percent. I'm the one out getting my valuables nipped off to supply you with Nagrak toenails."

Anya leaned forward, blood in her eye. "Ah, but you're inexperienced. I'm not going to pay you what I'd give a seasoned professional. Seventy-five dollars a week and a ten percent commission, and that's final."

Giles pretended absorption in the journal before him, but his curiosity was piqued. The ways and means by which Spike supported himself was a subject usually avoided by unspoken agreement. It went without saying that most of were them were dubious and some of them were downright criminal. Over the last two years the outright criminal had comprised a smaller and smaller percentage of the total--Buffy might make disapproving noises, but all in all, sharking pool and looting the lairs of the demons he killed were preferable to lurking in alleys in game face and trying to scare human passers-by out of their wallets.

This, however, was something else again. Giles slipped out from behind the counter and made his way to the bookshelves in the back of the shop. A glance back at the counter showed him Spike and Anya, platinum heads bent together in low-voiced colloquy--Spike explaining something in great detail, with emphatic gestures, while Anya typed furiously into the computer. "...have a business plan?" "...won't like you cutting in on their territory, but..." and "Clem can get us an in with..." floated over to the bookshelves. Apparently Spike had very specific ideas about the sort of business arrangement he was entering into. Giles scanned the shelves for a moment, plucked a copy of Santiago's _Boca Del Infierno: A Bestiary_ from its place and flipped it open.

The woodcut illustration of the Scirivin demon resembled an ambulatory muffin top covered with mold; it was roughly five feet across and a foot tall, not counting the carpet of waving eyestalks. Non-sentient, subsisted on sewer slime, secretes acid, aggressive if provoked, eyestalks useful in scrying spells... it certainly didn't look like anything illegal, immoral, or even fattening. But it couldn't hurt to make certain. Giles adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "I hate to interrupt a doubtless lucrative transaction, but Anya--are we certain this is entirely legal?"

Anya and Spike exchanged a look, and Spike's lip curled. "Knew that was coming up sooner or later."

"Legal, yes," Anya said, drumming on the edge of the keyboard with her pen. "And even moral, if that's your real question. Scirivin demons are neither sentient nor endangered." She hit a key and the printer hummed to life behind her. A moment later it spat out several pages covered with columns of figures. She picked up the pages and sorted through them, then handed the one from the top of the stack to Giles. "This is from our inventory. Spell component on the left, quantity in stock, price per unit, etcetera. As you can see, mainly herbs, minerals, and animal products. This--" she handed him two more pages-- "Is a list of legal demon products we don't usually carry due to problems with availability--in other words, because the supply's been sewn up by the same black market operators who deal in vivisecting harmless Hombja'moleev demons for their musk glands."

Spike buffed his nails on the lapel of his duster and smirked. "Until now."

*****

Even on a Monday, Christmas crowds made finding a parking spot an exercise in skill and coordination approaching one of the higher levels of Tomb Raider, unfortunately sans access to Angelina Jolie's stunt crew. Buffy sharked her way back and forth across the eight or nine square blocks of downtown Sunnydale for fifteen minutes before finding a spot blocks away from where she wanted to be. Another five minutes of backing and filling and at least one nerve-wracking crunch later, she gave up and left the SUV at a drunken angle, front wheels scraping the curb and rear wheels a good foot and a half away. Parallel parking was obviously a demon-inspired Slayer trap.

Heads turned as she walked by, and why not? She felt good. She looked good. The brisk wind and bright sun put pink in her cheeks and the memory of last night's diversions put bounce in her step. Her lavender knit cap and matching scarf added a kicky accent to her cream blouse and heather skirt (grey indeed; who knew vampires were color-blind?).

She hadn't been this confident in ages--not since facing down the Council last year--and it felt wonderful. She'd knocked them dead at the interview--poised, cheerful, enthusiastic, but not in a scary call- security way. Swinging along down Main Street, her gym bag slung over one shoulder, she was morally certain she'd gotten the job. Not that she really looked forward to four weeks of dealing with hordes of frenzied Christmas and post-Christmas shoppers, but the clothing department of Oshman's was infinitely to be preferred to some of the other jobs she'd gone in for--if she got this one, at least she'd be in daily contact with cute ski outfits and hundred-and-fifty-dollar pairs of running shoes.

Of course, it was only a temporary position, which she was infinitely grateful for, even as she tried to be responsible and grown-up about it. Focus on the basics. Job good. Money better. Especially considering the bills pilling up on her mother's old desk, and the letter in this morning's mail she refused to think about just now. It would be good for her, Buffy remonstrated with herself, getting out and connecting with people. Even people who _really_ shouldn't be trying to cram themselves into neon yellow spandex bike shorts at this stage of their exercise regimen.

The walk to the Magic Box provided another chance to scope out the ground for tonight's operation, at least. Buffy automatically noted the current positions of dumpsters and made calculations about the best places to corner Tanner in the event that he was alone, and ran through scenarios for getting him alone if he had his posse with him. She paused in front of the salon on the corner, irresistibly drawn by the smell of wet hair and perm solution. She peered through the front window. If the job came through maybe she'd splurge and get her hair done.

The Buffy in the window glass looked right through her, out at the street drenched in bright winter sunshine and the passers-by on the sidewalk behind her. Buffy put her hand to the cold expanse of glass, fingertip to fingertip with her reflection. Like touching a ghost. _Two months ago, I was dead._ She'd pass her reflection at the door, change places, and she'd become the ghost again, a wan, flat, colorless creature floating untouched through her own existence...

The suffocating numbness spread through her so swiftly that for a moment she was incapable of drawing breath. Her heart struggled to beat. She called images up like talismans: _Dawn, snitching her blue cashmere sweater, irritating and infinitely precious. New shoes. Willow's silly Elmo-skin top. Blueberry pancakes. Spike's eyes, wicked and tender; Spike's hands, large and clever and fitting so well to every curve of her body; Spike's mouth, oh, Spike's mouth..._

The emptiness within her thinned and faded away like morning fog. Buffy took a deep breath and turned away from the salon window, walking back out into the sunshine. She was meshed with the world again, feeling the slight pinch of her heels, the chill December wind lashing drifts of sycamore leaves through the gutters. That these moments still occurred was terrifying. That they were only moments now, brief interludes in a day full of worry about the meeting with Mrs. Kroger, excitement about the (fingers crossed!) new job, anticipation of tonight's battles--that was the miracle. A seagull was carving blinding white chevrons across the bright pale blue overhead, and it struck her that Spike's eyes were no longer the color of the sky. The sky was the color of Spike's eyes. _Oh, God, I need this job._

Spike wanted to help so badly. Dawn, and even Willow and Tara, didn't get why she couldn't let him. Surely Spike wasn't doing anything _that_ awful for money these days, and didn't all of them overlook his minor transgressions already? Would it really hurt to take the odd twenty for groceries, if only two of those twenty had accidentally leaked out of the hip pocket of some unsuspecting Bronze-goer?

That was the whole problem; way too easy for her to go from overlooking little things--because it was Spike, and he made her feel like slow-motion fireworks--to overlooking medium-sized things. Hopefully she'd never be so far gone that large things and Extra-Super-Big-Gulp-sized things were overlookable, but... wasn't that exactly the eventuality she'd made arrangements with Faith for? There was a constant chick fight going on between the part of her that just wanted to dance and shag and kick vampire ass and look fabulous while doing it, and the part concerned with following rules and doing the right thing for the right reasons and gaining the approval of parents and teachers and Watchers and ex-boyfriends and social workers and... and... that guy over there, the one with the hat.

None of her friends seemed to realize how very precarious was Good Buffy's chokehold on Bad Buffy. Especially when Good Buffy secretly longed to get in on the tastefully slutty outfits and ass-kicking herself. Give Spike an inch and he'd spoil her and Dawn both rotten, cater to their every whim with all the devotion he'd lavished on Drusilla back in the day. Very, very wrong, all that whim-catering, of course. Foot rubs, breakfast in bed, mysteriously-appearing designer clothing in her size... _Talk about sinister attraction._ It was totally unfair that she had to smack her own conscience around on top of contending with Spike's lack of same. _Bet Spike never suffers from internal monologues._ Buffy stuck her lower lip out, indulging in a small pity party, complete with cake and ice cream.

She couldn't make it last long. No one had held a gun to her head and forced her to jump Spike's delectable undead bones. The tingle up the back of her spine informed her that said bones were within jumping distance as she rounded the corner. The Magic Box's blue--was _everything_ that shade of blue these days?--storefront loomed up before her. She was simply going to have to be strong. Fair wasn't in the picture; she'd known all along that with Spike, she was always going to have to be the one to make with the restraint. Fortunately for all concerned, Spike enjoyed restraints. Darn it, that was a perfectly innocent sentence when it started out. Monday, 12:14 PM -- Sunnydale residents startled by loud crash when Buffy Summers officially fell into debauchery. _"I couldn't help it," Ms. Summers told reporters. "The dominatrix outfit came with the cutest thigh boots."_

The shop bell jingled merrily as she pushed the door open. Giles was seated at the library table, awash in journals and chewing on the end of his pen, his hair sticking up in rumpled tufts. Spike was lounging against the front counter, cleaning the disassembled trank gun while Anya toted up a column of figures on the adding machine. All three of them looked up and gave her distracted smiles as she bounced in, but all in all there was a distinct lack of hail-the-conquering-Buffy in the air.

Anya leaned over and pointed out a figure. "That would be your estimated quarterly income. Any commissions on items sold would be in addition to that."

Spike nodded with the mystified air of one to whom finances were an unexplored continent, but who does not wish to appear a complete dunce in front of the natives. "It'll do."

Buffy seriously considered breaking out the old pom-poms. "Hi, guys! The interview went really well. I thought I'd get some training time in before Dawn gets home from school--The Kroger's due at our place at four. I really think I nailed this one," she said, adding, when effusive congratulations were not forthcoming, "Oshman's. Over at the mall. It'd only be temporary, sales and inventory until after the Christmas rush, but it starts this week and I'd get two paychecks out of it and one would come before Christmas so we could have a real dinner and presents and..." Jeez, what did it take to sell these people? "Electricity, which I hear is popular this year? Plus it's selling the cute kind of sports clothes you're not actually supposed to sweat in, so employee discounts? Major bonus."

"That's... er... capital news," Giles said.

"Yay, Buffy!" Anya chimed in obligingly.

Buffy aimed a sorrowful only-you-can-save-my-mood-now-Obi-Wan pout at Spike, who immediately abandoned the lure of the trank gun and gave her a great big delighted grin, dimples and all. "Good on you, Slayer. Should last you till the Council sees reason and ponies up, any road." Mollified, Buffy allowed him to take her gym bag and followed him back over to the counter. She slipped an arm around Spike's waist--lack of winciness, check; healed up completely. He bent and purred into her ear, "Famished for sight of you, love."

"Mmm. How can I resist a man who's all over purple gooey stuff?" Buffy tipped her head back, and received far more satisfactory congratulations in the form of one of those eternal breathless kisses. Maybe teeny, tiny amounts of demon lover spoilage were tolerable, if she resolutely kept the badness thereof in mind? _That's it, I'll let him spoil me, but I won't enjoy it._ She craned her neck curiously at the papers covering the countertop. "What's up?"

Spike took a deep breath and Buffy felt her stomach sinking. _Uh oh. That's the Deep Breath of 'I can explain everything, Slayer.'_ Occasionally big with the entertainment value, but never of the good. Spike had that rehearsing look on his face, as if she'd caught him before he had his spiel completely worked out. "Right. It's like this, Buffy--"

Anya patted Spike's shoulder with a proprietary smile, as if he were a particularly clever puppy who'd just learned a new trick. "Spike is no longer an economic parasite!" she said proudly. "He's a productive member of the free market, selling his skills in healthy competition with his peers!"

Buffy pulled away slightly and cast wary eyes up at Spike, who was glaring the glare of the extremely cross vampire at the oblivious Anya. "And these skills you speak of would be...?" Buffy asked. _Sarcasm-o-grams to order? William the Bloody, vampire gigolo?_

"He's a free-lance demon hunter," Anya said, beaming. "Note the free-lance. _ Not_ an employee of the Magic Box, should anyone from Immigration and Naturalization or the IRS happen to ask."

Buffy wriggled a finger in one ear. "I'm sorry, I must have misheard, because I thought you just said Spike had become some kind of demon hunter. As in killing demons for money."

"Love, it's not exactly--"

Anya overrode him. "Spike already kills demons for money. Or at least, he kills demons for fun and sometimes he takes their belongings or body parts to exchange for money. Hadn't you noticed? It's made him quite unpopular. Really, Buffy, you're having sex with him; you ought to exhibit a little curiosity about what he does, even if you're not really interested. It's only polite."

Buffy unclenched her jaw sufficiently to form words. "I'll keep that in mind. So the big difference between Spike the economic parasite of yesterday and Spike the brilliant entrepreneur of today would be...?"

Anya opened her mouth to explain further, but Spike reached across the counter and (surprisingly gently) closed it. "Difference is I'm not killing 'em for fun and games," he said. "I'm doing it businesslike, going after particular demons I know we can make a good profit on."

_I can't let my guard down for a second, can I?_ She could feel herself freezing, veins and arteries becoming brittle latticeworks of ice from the heart all the way out to the tips of her fingers. Surely anyone touching her in that moment would have found her colder than Spike. The anger was directed as much at herself as at him. Stupid, naive little girl. Buffy pulled away from him, stepping back far enough to look him in the eye. "I thought," she said, "that we'd talked about this, and you weren't going to do it."

The muscle in his jaw was doing the twitchy thing. "We talked, Slayer, and as I recall agreed we weren't going to profit from anything exclusively used by the forces of wickedness. Oh, I forgot--does 'we talked about this' mean 'Spike agrees to ask Buffy's gracious permission before wiping his arse?' Sorry. Lost my Buffy-to-English dictionary."

Buffy blinked furiously. She was not going to start crying. She was too mad to start crying. "Damn it, Spike! Don't you dare make this about me!"

"Why not? Isn't everything about you?"

Nose to nose again, really furious this time. "No, it's about them!" Buffy waved an arm in the general direction of the street. "It's got to be about them, or I really am nothing but--did you really expect that announcing you were selling contraband demon guts to some sleazy black market scumbag would make me _happy?_"

"Excuse me, but as the sleazy black market scumbag in question..." Buffy whipped around; Anya stood her ground and met her eyes with pinch- mouthed irritation. "I would never endanger this store or my standing in the Sunnydale business community by selling illegal goods. What's your objection to the business arrangement I have with Spike?"

Buffy cocked her head to one side and assumed a vacuous stare. "Aside from it being wrong to chop people up and sell their livers? Gee, I don't know. Let me think about it."

"I'm not killing anything with the brains to complain about it. I'll save that for my own after-hours amusement. Since when are demons people to you, Slayer?" Spike's lip curled in equal parts amusement and disgust--equally infuriating, anyway. "You spent an ounce of worry in the last two years over whether I've confined my fun to killing the nasty varieties? Fuck all, Buffy, would you blink once at taking Clem's head off if you'd not been introduced?"

No, she hadn't, and she probably wouldn't, and Clem was no danger to anything but small furry mammals. The idea that there was an entire new arena where she'd feel obligated to police Spike's behavior (and, God help her, her own) made her feel faint. She was barely wrapping her brain around the concept that there _were_ any non-nasty varieties. The whole thing was getting way too complicated, with good demons and bad demons and demons who used to be people and people who used to be demons and if a train leaves Seattle at 5:00 AM traveling towards Denver at sixty miles an hour can you trust a soulless vampire any further than you can throw him? Buffy slapped her palm down on the counter, sending papers flying. When in doubt, resort to violence. "That's beside the point. I'm not the one demanding cash for taking back the night."

"Only 'cause you haven't talked the Council of Wankers into it yet. Jealous?"

_Seethingly; how come you get paid for having fun?_ Buffy turned on Anya. "Wasn't there some reason why haven't you ever carried any of this stuff before, Anya? Oh, right. Because the people who sell it are slime!" She snatched her hand back and clenched her fists at her sides. "I've had run-ins with them before. One of them thought Oz would make a great throw rug." She threw a beseeching look at Giles for support, but he was watching the exchange with aloof interest and said nothing.

Spike snorted. "So because Spells R Us down the road sells Hands of Glory at half price and has more customers go missing than Mrs. Lovett's Pie Shop, that means all magic stores are owned by ravening ghouls, eh?" He thrust the list of spell ingredients at her. "Not claiming I haven't disposed of a few gizzards with the shadier blokes in my time. Way I see it, if I'm going to kill something anyway, it's a pity and a shame to see the useful bits go to waste, and a vamp's got to eat. But for this deal it's going to be straight up. If you'd ever bothered to learn a thing about the beasties you've been killing for the last six years, you'd know there's not an item on the menu to raise a bishop's eyebrow."

Buffy shoved it back at him. Ghora, Scirivin, Luxos... she didn't know enough about the arcane science of demonology to tell if he was being truthful or not, though she had no reason to believe Anya was lying about it. "So from now on you're only going to help out if it'll bring in a profit?"

"I didn't say that," Spike snarled. He began re-assembling the trank gun, snapping pieces back into place with brutal efficiency. "Look, Anya's the one with the soul and the tax number. That's why I set this up the way I did, making her the middleman, because this time it is all about you, Buffy. Honest cash. And we--" he jabbed a forefinger into her chest, "--have a deal. You're going to take it, and it's going to help pay your sodding bills and buy your sodding groceries and buy the Bit something nice for Christmas. You're not meant for waiting on people, love--you're better than that."

The conviction in his voice rasped right down into her bones, a seductive pain. Her breath caught in her throat. "No. I'm _not_. What I do, what I am--the Slayer has to be _for_ something. I won't--I _can't_," Buffy gritted out, "take a single penny from you."

Spike's voice went low and hard. "I'll know what your word's worth, then, won't I? You told me to do what I thought was right, Slayer--even if you hated me for it. And what I think's right is taking care of my girls." He jammed the last piece of the trank gun back into place and nodded to Anya. "Be on my way. Thanks."

"You're welcome." Anya directed a smile at Buffy, a tight, sharp-toothed expression that made one suspect her demon aspect wasn't as long-lost as one might like to believe. "Xander says if I can't say anything polite, I shouldn't say anything. So I won't say anything to you right now." She began clearing the scattered papers off the counter, then, with icy hauteur, added, "Peter Parker sells photographs of himself. I _checked._"

Buffy stood frozen, the tense lines of Spike's back as he stalked off down the basement stairs burnt into her retinas. She'd said and done all the wrong things, and was still flailing for the right ones. She smashed her fist into the counter and ran for the training room, slamming the door behind her.

*****

Buffy had changed into sweats and a tank top, pulled her hair back in tails and ditched the heels for sneakers by the time Giles entered the training room, and was whaling furiously away at the punching bag. Every blow featured a paired imprecation: "Stupid..." (kick) "Pig-headed..." (punch) "Brain-fried..." (chop) "Vampire!"

Giles watched her critically for a moment. She was not so much sparring as attempting to pummel it into submission. "You're leading with your left."

She gave the bag another vicious blow. A seam popped. "I hate him!"

"Under normal circumstances I'd call that a healthy turn of events. Buffy..." Giles refrained from pulling off his glasses; he'd polish right through the lenses at this rate. There must be some special category of Oscar reserved especially for Watchers consoling their Slayers over a quarrel with her vampire lover, a lifetime achievement award in irony. By all rights he should be taking this opportunity to nudge her towards breaking it off, but... but. "Much though it pains me to defend Spike in any capacity, out of consideration for our insurance premiums, I feel bound to point out that he hasn't done anything wrong. Yet."

"Yet! Exactly!" Buffy executed a spin-kick which would have taken the head off of a Zagros demon, dropped flat to the training mat to avoid the bag on the backswing, leaped to her feet and unleashed a flurry of punches. "He doesn't--unh!--get it. He'll never get it. He's incapable of--mmf!--getting it." She drove both fists into the bag, sending it careening wildly in circles. "And I'm the dorky tourist in No Soul Land, convinced that if I just talk loudly and slowly and use words of one syllable--I'm deluding myself that this could ever work."

"Very likely so." Giles shoved his hands in his jeans pockets.

Buffy collapsed cross-legged to the mat and yanked off the purple happy-face scrunchy holding her ponytail. Strands of honey-blonde fell to her shoulders and she stared at the scrunchy with horror. "This is _Dawn's_ . My life is in shambles and I'm wearing Dawn's scrunchy." She wrapped the scrunchy around her hand, toying with the elastic. "It's all gotten so complicated." Her voice trailed away, soft and devoid of emotion. "I loved Angel. That was all I had to know. And then it wasn't--it wasn't enough. I loved Riley. And that wasn't enough either. So what makes me think it'll be enough this time?"

Giles sighed and sat down on the bench against the wall, the dark green vinyl hissing under his weight. What had Maria Lupe's Watcher felt, seeing a slim brown hand laid across dappled tawny fur, dark liquid eyes caught up in pools of molten gold? He wished he could call across the centuries--_ Was she happy? Did her heart shine in her eyes when he walked in? Did he batter himself bloody against his own limitations for her sake? Were your reports to the Council as full of careful omissions as my own?_ "It won't be." Buffy's breath took a short wounded hitch. "Love by itself never is. But without it, you would most certainly be doomed. My dear girl... Spike is like the dog who walks on his hind legs. The wonder is not that he does it poorly, but that he does it at all. If that's not enough for you..." He left the real question--_should it be enough for you?_ \--hanging in mid-air. "Best end it now before either of you is hurt more." He hesitated. "It's hardly an encomium, but remember that Spike kills because he loves to kill. The money's as secondary to him as it is to you."

"Secondary." Her laugh was hollow. "Our bank account's almost empty. I added it all up two or three times, and I know math wasn't exactly my best subject, but it won't be long before checks start bouncing. The child support covers Dawn's school books and clothes and lunches and stuff, but there's nothing left over. Mom's ADC check will be cut off next month when I turn twenty-one--Dawn'll still be getting hers, but it should go towards college. Willow and Tara can only chip in so much, and I got a letter from the insurance company this morning saying that our shingles were shot and we had to get a new roof or they'd cancel our coverage." She looked up, her eyes damp and bright, lichen on wet stone. "That's, like, ten thousand dollars. Or more. Even if I do get this job with Oshman's, Spike's moneymaking scheme is looking really, really good."

It was far easier to disdain money when one had it in quantity, Giles mused. "The job isn't perhaps the most savory in the world, but it may prove useful--if Spike's known to be out hunting demons, it gives us a good cover to do likewise without alerting the Council that you're still slaying."

"Right. _My_ moneymaking scheme, which is ever so morally superior." Buffy buried her face in her hands, all small and muffled. "You know what's scary? When he tells me I'm too good to sell clothes or wait tables, something in me wants to believe him. How can I possibly trust him to do the right thing when I can't trust myself?"

"You were perfectly willing to endanger our ruse by leaping into the fray last night. I doubt your mercenary instincts have completely overwhelmed you." That elicited a small, hiccupy laugh. Giles slid off the bench and knelt beside her, laying a hand on her shoulder. "Buffy...I never thought this day would come, but I agree with Spike. Not that you're too good to wait tables--there's no work that's beneath anyone if it's done with good will--but that you're good enough to do better. Perhaps you'll wait tables for now, but for now isn't your entire life."

He felt the rise and fall of her back under his hand, so deceptively frail beneath the cotton tank top, scapulae as light and fragile as a bird's creasing the curve of her spine. When she'd first come back he could count each rib; now there was muscle there, thin and solid. After a moment she straightened and sat up, weary but resolute. "So. You said there was other stuff you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Yes." Giles got to his feet, removing his glasses and rubbing the back of his neck against an incipient tension headache. "When I spoke to Quentin Travers last, he dropped some obscure hints as to why he was reluctant to allow a Slayer independence, financial or otherwise, from her Watcher."

"Ooh, yeah, the willful bit." Buffy got to her feet, glanced at the somewhat worse-for-wear punching bag and walked over to the pommel horse. "Any minute now I'll be wearing my knickers buckled below the knee and smoking cornsilk behind the barn." She pulled herself up onto the horse with a single graceful motion.

"I've done considerable research in the last few days on Slayers who've lasted as long as you have--there aren't many--and I believe I'm getting an idea what Travers has been hinting at." He stopped. How to introduce this? "I believe Travers expected me to draw exactly this conclusion, and I believe he was counting on my being shocked at it. Needless to say, he seriously underestimates my threshold for alarm."

Buffy's breath hissed between her teeth as she flipped over. Giles took automatic note of her form, though it had been some time since he'd found any serious flaws to criticize. "Alarminess factor high but non-critical. Check."

"Actually I find it rather intriguing," Giles said. "Bear in mind that this is largely speculation on my part. Has it ever struck you as odd that an organization such as the Watcher's Council, which keeps exhaustive records of its activities and has lasted in one form or another for at least two millennia, hasn't so much as a fireside tale concerning the event which justifies its existence? We have several accounts of the origins of vampires--and setting aside the question of how accurate any of them are, why have we no equivalent legends of the origin of the Slayer?"

"Eh. It registers a 2.5 on the weirdness scale." Buffy went into a mid-air split, toes impeccably pointed. "Personally, a little too busy being the Slayer to bemoan my lack of a thrilling origin story. At least before the whole Dracula thing." She made a rueful face. "And not much afterwards. Avoidance and repression work so well for me." She flowed into a handstand. "Besides, the inconvenient part where you have to die before a new Slayer's called? Not a lot of opportunity to pass down secret origins and Aunt Martha's gingerbread recipes."

"Mmm." Giles sat down on the bench again and leaned forward, steepling his fingers. "The odds of the truth surviving from the Neolithic to the present is virtually nil, quite correct--but mankind is a storytelling beast. If the truth was lost, why haven't we made up a few comforting lies to take its place? How did the First Slayer come to exist? How is a new Slayer chosen when the old one dies?"

"Huh." Buffy went through a few more spine-twisting contortions, barely breaking a sweat. "I guess I always assumed that Slayers were the flunkies of the Powers That Be."

"Hardly. Recall that Whistler told you that the Powers never saw you coming. Primarily, I would assume, because according to prophecy you were supposed to have died the previous year; ever since you've been a wild card. But were Slayers the especial province of the Powers, I would expect the Powers to check in on them occasionally. Consider what few facts we have. The first Slayers arose not long after the first vampires, created or summoned specifically to deal with them. They are always female, always Chosen at the age of fifteen. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of potential Slayers alive at any given moment. The Council has some rather unreliable methods of identifying them, and attempts to do so and train them as they did with Kendra--but as you and Faith can attest, many Slayers aren't identified by the Council until after their powers manifest."

Buffy gave him an upside-down frown. "And this relates to my lack of paycheck how?"

"Dracula claimed that your powers were rooted in darkness. In a sense he may have been correct. I believe your powers may be of demonic origin. As the saying goes, set a thief to catch a thief. Whatever or whoever created the Slayers, it was not the Watchers' Council; we are latecomers, trying to harness a force we don't fully understand...and perhaps rightly, fear."

Buffy froze mid-figure, the whites of her eyes showing all the way around the pupils. She dropped to the floor with a thump, still gripping the handles of the pommel horse with white-knuckled intensity. "Dracula was all 'Join me, Buffy, and we can rule the galaxy yadda yadda.' He was running a con. Wasn't he?"

Giles replaced his glasses. "I'd hardly classify him as a trusted source, but our encounter with the First Slayer supports it. It--she--was a primal force, scarcely human, contemptuous of human ties--Buffy, do stop hyperventilating."

"I can't be a demon!" Buffy grabbed his arm in wild-eyed panic. "I kill demons! This is not ew. This is beyond ew. This is Return of the Son of Ew Meets Abbott and Costello Vs. the Wolf Man!"

Giles winced and pried her fingers out of his biceps. "I didn't say that you were. I said that it's possible--possible, mind--that your powers are of demonic origin. Something similar, perhaps, to the origins of the vengeance demons--human women infused with a greater or lesser degree of demonic essence. In the case of Slayers, strength, speed, agility, accelerated healing, prophetic dreams, and an affinity for weapons. Possibly other talents, if our experience in channeling the First Slayer is any indication, that few Slayers live long enough to realize. If I'm correct, this goes a long way towards explaining the Council's desire to keep it a secret, and their reluctance to grant you independence of your Watcher. A Slayer aware of her origins..."

Buffy swallowed hard, looking sick. "That's not all it would explain."

*****

Dawn shot a worried glance at the kitchen clock as Willow packed the necessary ingredients into her trusty blue nylon duffle with her usual care: incense and burner to the left, herbs in the portable spice rack, athame in its sheath to the right. Willow gave her a reassuring smile. "It's only two. We'll have it all out of the way before The Kroger gets here."

"I know." Dawn went back to her microscopic examination of the counters for crumbs, cat hair, or any evidence that human beings had used the kitchen for food preparation in the last fifty years. "I'm not nervous. I just want everything to be perfect." She checked behind the toaster and started re-arranging the flour and sugar canisters. "The living room got vacuumed, right? And ohmigod--" She dashed for the refrigerator, flung open the door and pulled out the jug of pig's blood, yanked off the cap and headed for the sink. "I should dump it, right? Or no. There should be a clever explanation, like it's for paint thinner or something. I'm freaking, aren't I? I shouldn't be freaking. That's Buffy's job." She stuck the blood back into the fridge. "I'm going to clean my room. Again." And she was off, hair a chestnut banner behind her, footsteps thumping up the stairs double-time.

"She may look like Dawn..." Willow intoned.

"She may sound like Dawn..." Tara responded.

"But she's a Pod Person from the planet Mars!" they chorused together, dissolving into giggles.

"OK, serious now." Tara wiped her eyes. "We've got all the components for the glamor spell?"

Willow peered into the duffle. "Pocket mirrors, Scotch tape, photos of average-type people, check."

"Components for the crazy-curing spell?"

_She's upstairs, cleaning her room._ Willow squirmed for a moment, then realized that her lack of response was leaving absent-minded territory and rapidly approaching distinctly odd country. "Um, it doesn't need any. Just like the one I used on you, y'know? Totally words and finger-wavy stuff." She held up both hands and wriggled her fingers illustratively. Tara sat back, playing with an amethyst crystal, her brow wrinkled.

"Wow--for all those people, I thought you'd need the focus a ritual would provide. That's..." She trailed off, obviously wanting to ask questions and just as obviously afraid the questions would be ill-received. "Impressive," she finished, offering up the word for inspection with hopeful eyes.

"It's not that big a deal." Willow's airy shrug as she took the amethyst and stuffed it into the duffle felt false and nervous in her own muscles. "I already had the basic spell worked out, remember? All I had to do was modify it."

Tara kept looking at her for a long moment, then said, "Components for the draining spell?"

"Amulet, uncharged, check. Funnel, amethyst, incense--oh, fudge, darts!" Willow dropped the duffle to the floor and dashed over to the stove and the two-quart saucepan which had been huddled forlornly on the back burner for the last two days. A proper witch, she sometimes thought, would have had a cauldron like Amy Madison's mother had owned, but here she was stuck with a piece of battered Revereware. Willow lifted the lid and peeked inside; the darts were still steeping in Infusion of Icky Stuff--hellebore, nightshade, the usual suspects.

Willow took a wooden spoon (the special Potion Spoon, under no circumstances to be used for whipping up cookie dough) from its hook on the wall and fished out a dart. In the overhead light of the stove they were starting to reveal a greenish, phosphorescent luster. "I think these are ready--I'll just quick run them over to Spike's crypt." She pulled a Ziplock bag from the cupboard beneath the sink and began spooning darts into it, careful not to dribble any of the liquid on bare skin. They glowed malevolently, and Willow turned the bag this way and that, admiring her work. Was this or was this not cool?

"Don't take too long," Tara said.

For a second Willow was caught in those deep clear eyes like a fly in amber; time slowed to a snail's pace and Tara's words seemed to resonate through the room, carrying meaning far beyond the obvious. Then the moment was gone and Willow gave her beloved a quick confident grin.

"'Course not, I'll be back before four."

She gave Tara a hurried peck on the cheek and waved as she went out the kitchen door. She looked back, once, as she walked down the driveway; Tara's form was silhouetted in the nearer of the kitchen windows, watching over her--a guardian angel, or a guard dog? Willow felt an unreasonable stab of anger; did Tara still not trust her, after all they'd been through?

It was a beautiful day, bright and breezy and a little bit chilly, with the bare white branches of ash and mulberry trees, the last of their golden leaves still clinging in defiance of the wind, intersecting against the invariant green of palms and pines. The sort of day other towns in colder climes had in October. Sometimes she forgot how picturesque Sunnydale was in daylight. Willow strolled down the streets, taking her time, feeling the comforting warmth of the magic curling within her. The bag of darts, safely tucked away in her book bag, bumped against her side, and she ran over what she was going to say in her head, changing a word here and a sentence there. She was only going to get to say it once, and it had to be perfect.

She crunched down the gravel path which wound between the tombstones until Spike's crypt came into sight. The strains of "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" drifted through the quiet cemetery, telling her Spike was home and up and about--she'd been a little worried that he might be asleep, considering how little he'd probably gotten last night. Willow shifted the bag from one hand to the other and knocked on the crypt door. No answer. She sidled round to the nearest window and pressed her nose to the grimy sill. In addition to the music welling up from downstairs--how many speakers did Spike have attached to that dinky little turntable, anyway?--the TV was on full blast, but there was no one in sight--had he stepped out, or was he downstairs? She hated just barging in the way Buffy did; it always seemed so... familiar. She grabbed the dusty iron bars of the window grill and half-hopped, half-pulled herself up for a better view. There was Spike's favorite beat-up old armchair, the new(er) settee and the scatter of books and magazines across the low table, the looming stone angels and the sarcophagus--no Spike.

Willow dropped down and gnawed on a fingernail. She could leave the darts, but then she'd have to think of another excuse to drop by and catch him alone--no easy task these days when he and Buffy were joined at the hip. _Ew. Next on the Not-Going-There Channel..._ Working herself up for this had been hard enough. Reluctantly, Willow returned to the crypt door and gave it a little shove. Unlocked as usual, it swung in and Willow took a few tippy-toe steps inside, keeping to the lee of the nearest hunk of decorative funerary marble. Underneath the pounding beat of the music, a low rhythmic chanting became audible.

"...hundredn'fifty-seven, hundredn'fifty-eight, Timmy, you git, she's lying through her teeth! hundredn'fifty-nine..."

Willow peered around the body-sized urn at the same time Spike jackknifed up from behind the settee, hands laced behind his head. "AAAHHHH!!" Twin yells of surprise drowned out both the Ramones and Samantha's latest machinations: Willow dropped her book bag, Spike lurched backwards across the crypt floor, and both froze, identical expressions of embarrassment on their faces.

Willow recovered first. "I didn't see that if you didn't."

Spike slumped back on his elbows, blew out his cheeks, rolled over and got to his feet. "Could scare a bloke out of ten years' death, you could," he grumbled. "Made me lose count." Vampires doing sit-ups barely even registered on the Sunnydale Odd-O-Meter, but Willow sometimes wondered, considering supernatural vampire strength and speed and all, just what purpose Spike's compulsive working out served--male vanity? Or another method of distancing himself from his own past, the shadowy Ur-William glimpsed now and then behind the leather and bleach and sinewy grace? Spike hitched dangerously low-riding black sweat pants up on narrow hips and bent over to turn the volume on the TV down. "What's the occasion? Slayer decide I'm on the bench for tonight? Happens a law-abiding vamp can take a stroll downtown any time he feels the urge, so--"

"No, no--I haven't seen Buffy since this morning. Special delivery." She unslung the bookbag from her shoulder and dug around inside for the darts, pulling them free and holding the glowing packet up for inspection. "Here you go. One of these puppies should knock anything with feet off them."

Spike took the bag and grinned, an extremely nasty expression indeed. "Thanks, pet. I'll see they all get good homes."

"Why would Buffy--did you guys have a fight?"

He shrugged, affecting nonchalance though his eyes were hard and his mouth had an angry twist to it. "Difference of opinion." When Willow didn't make a move to leave, he paused, obviously uncertain. "Did you want to sit for a bit? Nothing worth watching on telly, but I've got cocoa." One shoulder twitched in a half-shrug. "If you're cold. Being pathetic and human and all. You lot ate me out of house and tomb last time you were here, might as well finish it off."

Dang it, did he have to be thoughtful, offer of hospitality, be as close to nice as Spike got? Willow felt sweat breaking out on her forehead. Darn. Vampires could smell fear; did she smell scared? Did nervous and semi-guilt-stricken count? "Actually I have something else to give you." Though why should she feel guilty? It wasn't like she was going to hurt him--why, he wanted this. He'd said so hundreds of times. She was doing him a favor. "It's kind of... well, I was pretty pissy to you after Buffy came back. I'm sorry, and I want to make it up to you."

He was startled, she could tell; startled and, she thought, touched. Spike cocked his head to one side with that look of startlingly gentle inquiry which--well, if she'd still been of a mind to admit to urges of the het variety, she could see why this was a look which made Buffy melt. "Ah, Will...no need for that. I'm a bad, rude man and proud of it, and if I can't take as good as I give I deserve the thumping." He grinned again, a much more appealing version this time. "Though if you're taking orders, I wouldn't say no to a plate of chocolate walnut chip. Make up for the biscuit crumbs you left in my bed."

"It wasn't exactly that kind of chip I was thinking about," Willow said.

"Eh?" More head-tilt, winter-sky eyes full of confusion--what was the matter with him? Spike was a smart guy; surely he had to realize what she was hinting at--ask, heck, beg, make it easy on her! "Will, what are you getting at?"

"I can take the chip out."

The expression on his face was something to see. Hope. Exaltation. Horror. Doubt. Fear. Joy. (And do not, do not think about the hunger.) Before nerves could overwhelm her she rushed the words out. "OK, so you know how the Initiative doctors said that the chip was embedded in your cerebral cortex? And how removing it could leave you a vegetable?"

Spike propped himself against the urn, arms folded across his chest. "It rings a bell." He looked rueful. "I didn't believe the wanker at the time--shouldn't matter if he took an eggbeater to the noggin, should it? Vampire; if I'm not dust, it'll heal. But I did some reading up later and the bleeder was right in his way--the physical damage would heal right enough, but no guarantee the post stitch-up personality would match up to old Spike in wit, charm, and general refinement."

"Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat." Willow hid one hand behind her back and began making a series of movements with her fingers. "I wouldn't know where to begin with the surgical route, but sense a piece of silicon and plastic in the middle of a nice squishy brain? Cake, piece of. And teleporting a goddess five miles up, kind of a strain on the faculties, but teleporting a quarter-sized doohickey one foot to the left? Not so much."

Magic required focus, required words and gestures and components. You couldn't cast a spell by will alone; you had to take the magic and funnel it through the proper channels, word balanced against word, sigil against sigil, catch the power in a delicate, adamantine net of conditions and requirements... "Tonight we're going up against human-type people, right? And the last time you almost got your head peeled open, 'cause you couldn't fight them. Not helpful. But if you _could_ fight them--"

"Hold hard, Will!" Spike straightened and began pacing, hampered slightly by the sunlight pouring through the open doorway. A frown creased his brow. "You can really do this?"

She smiled--innocent, helpful Willow. "No reason why not."

He was hovering on the edge, right there, one foot over the precipice, every instinct in him screaming Do it, do it! She'd seen that look. She'd worn that look. She and Spike were alike on so many levels, and she knew, knew, knew that in a second he'd fall to the temptation, because there were offers no one could resist, and if he asked, it wasn't really her fault, was it...?

"Let me talk to Buffy first," he said, and Willow's nerves transmuted to rage in an instant. How dare he? How dare _he_, when she'd-- Her fingers closed convulsively on the last word: _Remove,_ in Ameslan.

There was no law at all that said the language of a spell had to be a _spoken_ one.

Spike swayed, caught himself, and stared at her in wild conjecture. His voice was a harsh, barely comprehensible growl. "Will--"

She held out her hand; in the center of her palm was the tiny glittering circle, still damp from cerebral fluids. Spike's hand went to the back of his head, raking through the thick blond hair, finding nothing but unbroken, undamaged skull, and for a second there was nothing but _Oh, God, no!_ in his eyes, but in another second it was vanished, replaced by a terrible elation. She felt a nasty, weaselly kind of satisfaction--_No better than I am after all, are you, Spike?_ "Souvenir," she heard herself say. "Because, you know, you're a Scooby now, and we trust you."

His mouth worked; no sound came out.

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention my part in this," she said, gently, but with a force behind the words that made the air sizzle. "To anyone."

And she left him there, dumbstruck in the doorway to the crypt, and started the long walk home. She walked swiftly now, pulling her sweater close about her, and as she stumbled through the bright sunshiny streets she found herself gasping, sobbing, tears running down her cheeks--fear, relief, betrayal--but whom had she betrayed? There was a sick awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. She was going to throw up, barge right into the living room and barf in Mrs. Kroger's lap, she was sure of it. "I did it," she said, choking on the words. "I did it. Are you happy? Is this enough?"

**_For now_**, said the voice of liquid ebony. **_For now_**.


	26. Chapter 26

He wasn't going to fuck this up.

Spike slouched in the comfortable embrace of his beat-up armchair, turning his shot glass round and round in his fingers. Willow'd been gone for an hour, and the litany in his head hadn't let up for a second. The whiskey warming his belly was starting to get lonely and hint that it could use some company. He cast a longing glance at the bottle of JD on top of the refrigerator. His fingers clenched on the armrest, gripping the layer of ancient fabric and cotton batting so tightly that the wood frame beneath creaked under the pressure. He didn't want another drink; that would imply needing another drink which would imply nervousness which would imply he had something to be nervous about. Which he didn't.

He _wasn't_ going to fuck this up.

He sank further into the chair and glowered into the depths of his empty glass. Not like it was the end of the world, or the beginning of it. Bit unexpected, was all. What the hell had Wills been thinking, yanking the chip out of his head without a by-your-leave? Bloke had to work up to something like that. Not that she hadn't done him a favor, not that he wasn't grateful--balls, he was bloody well overjoyed--but he'd have liked a little warning, and a chance to talk it over with Buffy first. He set the glass down on the crypt floor. What had Wiccagirl meant, telling him not to mention it? This was no time for modesty. No, he'd tell Buffy right off and they'd chat it out. Everything nice and civilized--they could do that, couldn't they? A snarl twisted his lips at the memory of their earlier argument. Self-righteous bitch'd probably decide he'd had it pulled on purpose and--

With a rumble of disgust Spike heaved himself to his feet and padded downstairs to change into jeans and...anything not a black T-shirt. But he'd been hitting his meager supply of non-funereal colors hard lately, and all he could find clean after ransacking both dresser and wardrobe (five black T-shirts, two plain black button-downs, three patterned black button-downs, one black turtleneck) was the godawful black-grey-white variegated knit pullover Dawn had given him just before her Dad had shown up to take custody. Probably nicked, which thought, no matter how dutifully he tried, still made him feel more pleased and proud of her than disapproving; would have been a crime to pay for a thing like that. Wasn't the reaction you wanted from an honorary white hat, was it? He'd have to do better than that. _Make_ himself do better.

The pullover made him look like an undead zebra, but it would have to do. Spike yanked it on over his head, laced up his boots, and started for the tunnels. Two steps into the echoing passageway he pulled up short and turned back to his bedroom, and hauled from beneath the bed the army surplus duffle wherein was stuffed a haphazard selection of his dirty laundry. He'd been meaning to hit the Wash N' Go one of these nights, but Buffy had a washing machine, and it was easier to have an existential crisis with more variety in his wardrobe.

It should have happened at night, he thought as he made his way through the tunnels. He'd have known what to do at night. He'd have been one with the darkness, sure, strong, utterly confident in his decision to...what? Once upon a time, and not all that long ago either, he'd had it all planned out, what he'd do when the chip came out. Whole thing choreographed down to the last scream and witty remark: the stalk, the fight, the victory, the last shared look encompassing his triumph and the Slayer's utter defeat before his fangs tore the life from her throat. He'd put a lot of thought into the epigram he'd paint on the wall of the Magic Box with her blood once he'd drunk his fill--something from Donne, perhaps. Then he'd kill the whelp and the Watcher and turn the witch, who'd make a smashing vampire, and take her to Brazil, there to hunt up Drusilla and flaunt his new conquest in her face until she realized what a stupid cow she'd been to cut him off. His dark princess would beg him to take her back, and he'd punish her for a suitable length of time before doing so--Dru'd love that part--and then they'd be off, the three of them, traveling the world and leaving a three-deep trail of corpses behind them.

'Course after hanging about Sunnydale long enough, he'd had to change the plan around a few times. Shag Buffy within an inch of her life, so she'd realize what she'd been missing, and _then_ kill her. Right. Much better that way. And maybe he wouldn't turn Red after all--she'd been right considerate, unlike the rest of the Scooby tossers. Maybe he'd leave her warm and breathing instead, get Dru to do that thrall thing. And Buffy--he'd leave her alive to appreciate just exactly how badly he'd beaten her. Besides, Joyce would get all teary-eyed if he killed her daughter, and he couldn't do that to the woman who made the best cocoa in Southern California. Though he'd definitely kill Harris. And then go on a spree the likes of which Sunnydale had never seen, flood the mortuary for a week. Yeah, that was the stuff. Or--yeah, this was it--he wouldn't do anything at all, just keep up the helpful act, and when the truth finally came out he'd turn to Buffy with a smug look: _Yeh, love, it's been out for months. Told you I could be good_ and she'd fall into his arms and he'd give Harris the punch in the nose he so richly deserved...

...and now? The nose-punching still sounded good. Chip coming out didn't change a thing--just like he'd told Buffy, just like he'd told Angel, just like he'd told himself, he could do the right thing, chip or no chip. He could. Long as he could hold still long enough to suss out what the right thing was. What the hell _was_ wrong with Willow? She'd been off, definitely off. Up to something. Something fucking brill for him, but something. Spike curled his fingers into a fist and watched the play of muscle and tendon under the pale skin as he strode down the long echoing tunnel, a feral grin spreading across his face.

No more backing down from the likes of Shaun and David if a bet went bad, no more skulking, no more hiding. No more veneer of bravado plastered over rage and terror when some redneck bastard decided the little English guy was easy pickings. Not that he'd pick fights. Absolutely not. No swaggering into the Fish Tank and pounding the biggest, most thick-headed lunk in the joint into hamburger just because he could because... because why? Oh, yeah, it was wrong. Or so he was told. Though it would be fun. 'Cept it wouldn't really be in the nature of a fight, would it? More of a test. See if Wills had really done what she'd said she had, because after all this might be some sort of Wiccan practical joke, mightn't it? And absolutely no luring said thick-headed lunk into the alley and...

A noise down the tunnel caught his ear. A splash, a chittering--Spike set the duffle gently down on the damp concrete of the walkway which ran above the sluggish stream of effluvium in the channel below. His nostrils twitched, his keen sense of smell sifting out the strong rank scent of Rattus Norvegicus from beneath the even less savory odors of the sewer. He let his breath out in a long hiss and slipped into game face, dropping into a crouch. He ghosted down the tunnel, boots feather-light on the pavement--how many times had Angelus thumped him for making noise, those first few years? If he had a quid for each beating he'd own Microsoft by now. But it had paid off--he might be a bit rusty after buying his dinner at the butcher's for the last two years, but a century and more of hard-won stalking expertise wasn't forgotten that easily.

Ah, there it was. Spike's whole world narrowed to the sleek brown shape nosing along the base of the wall. The rat hadn't heard him yet; it bumbled along, sniffing for tidbits, licking the condensation which trickled down the tiles and provided a slightly less tainted source of drinking water for the creatures of Sunnydale Underground. He could hear its heartbeat over the low gurgle of the sewer if he concentrated, a swift fierce patter of life. It sat up on its hindquarters and bared strong yellow teeth in defiance at the world, and Spike grinned right back at it--_You and me, mate, survivors. I just plan on surviving a little longer than you will_. Spike swerved to avoid the pencil-thin shafts of sunlight filtering down through the holes in a manhole cover overhead, running the tip of his tongue over his fangs and reining in the hysterical giggle that threatened to burst from him at any moment. Christ, if anyone saw him now! William the Bloody, Scourge of Europe, giddy with joy at the prospect of killing a rat!

He pounced with infernal speed, skidding across the concrete with arms outstretched and fangs bared. The rat had time to react, just barely, before his fingers closed on it. It squealed and twisted in his grip, incisors sinking into the flesh of his hand, and Spike struck back just as swiftly and viciously, fangs piercing thin, foul-tasting hide and penetrating deep into the warm flesh beneath--

No pain. Oh merciful heavens, no pain, no blue-white forked-lightning shocks shattering his skull, no nothing but sweet hot living blood on his tongue. Not the teasing, chip-aborted taste he'd gotten at Halloween, not the reheated, days-stale leavings of someone else's slaughter--this was life itself coursing down his throat for the first time since Dru'd killed that college boy for him, and a million times better because he'd made this kill himself. Even if it was just a sodding rat, and objectively speaking tasted like shit. Spike snarled as the creature twitched and stilled in his grasp and the flow of liquid bliss slowed to a trickle and ceased; there wasn't much more than a swallow or two in a rat. Licking every trace of crimson from his lips, he tossed the cooling corpse into the sewer and looked hungrily around for more. Stand very still, and listen... yeah. _There._

Fifteen rats and one stray Pomeranian (well, stray in the sense that he'd reached out of a sewer grate and snatched it) later, Spike ambled up to the bottom of the ladder leading to the manhole on Revello Drive, painfully full and blissfully happy. With any luck, in about ten minutes Buffy would be rubbing his tummy while he drowsed off his over-indulgence with his head in her lap--surely she was ready to make up by now. He patted the slight bulge in his normally board-flat stomach with a satisfied belch. Considering he was going to have to make a dash for Buffy's front door to achieve this nirvana, perhaps he'd gone a bit overboard, but killing the things was such a damned kick it was difficult to stop. Spike hitched his laundry over one shoulder and set out up the ladder.

He was absolutely, positively not going to fuck this up.

*****

Buffy and Dawn might regard Doris Kroger as a bureaucratic fiend in human form, dispatched to torment them with forms in triplicate, but Willow had never minded Dawn's social worker. They'd met several times over the summer, while Dawn had been staying with Willow's parents and Giles had been trying to track down Hank Summers in Milan or Zambezi or wherever he'd been. Mrs. Kroger was a plump fortyish woman with a pouf of henna'd hair and a fondness for polyester pantsuits, whose perpetual air of vague apology masked a pair of very sharp eyes. She reminded Willow a little of her own mother, except less strident and actually interested in what you were saying. Of course, Willow had always gotten along better with adults than with people her own age, and now at last her own age was getting to the point where getting along with adults was reason to rejoice rather than an occasion for another visit to the guidance counselor.

But most of all Willow liked--nay, worshiped with an abiding passion--Doris Kroger because she was arriving in something less than forty minutes, and all attention would focus on her.

There was a burning spot right between her shoulderblades, just in that spot where you couldn't reach to scratch. It was the accumulated weight of who-knew-how-many accusing searchlight stares following her, all of which knew exactly what she'd done--never mind that there was no one else in the living room. Her insides were a yarn-ball tangle of guilt and worry which would have done Miss Kitty proud.

Where was that annoying dark voice when she wanted it to soothe her conscience and dismiss her fears? She hadn't done anything wrong, she reassured herself. Spike had wanted the chip out for ages. And he was all domesticated these days, just a big ol' bleached-blond teddy bear with fangs. Wasn't he? Willow took a firmer grip on the handle of the teacup she was setting out. The gilt on the rim was slightly worn, revealing the austere white purity of the china beneath. "Aurum in integrum restituere," she whispered. Power flowed and curled within her, smooth as film noir smoke, banishing doubt and fear. As her thumb traced the curvature of the rim, a slim perfect line of gold followed behind it. It glinted in the afternoon sun and for a second Willow felt happiness of the sort she would never, ever wish on Angel.

**_Is it not worth a few small errands, this power?_** the ebony voice inquired, faintly amused.

It was almost a relief, not to be alone in her own head. _I'm not doing this for the power_, she protested. _I'm doing it to help restore the Balance._

Laughter, deep and dark and bitter as Aztec chocolate, flavored with blood and cayenne. _** Yes, but the power is no less sweet for that, is it?**_ her invisible companion said. **_ You need not lie to me. Or to yourself. Only to them, as is necessary for their comfort. You deserve power, Willow Danielle Rosenberg. You were born for it. Do not shy from your birthright out of fear or false modesty._**

The images burned in her mind: what she could do, who she could become. Vampires exploding into incandescent clouds of dust at a wave of her hand, demons abasing themselves at her feet. She strode fearless through the streets of Sunnydale... or why not L.A.? Paris, London, Alexandria, Harvard, M.I.T., Cambridge, the Bodleian, Stonehenge--ancient repositories of mystic knowledge thrown open to her eager eyes by obsequious men and women in tweed and sensible shoes--_ It's Willow Rosenberg! It's such an honor, Miss Rosenberg..._ A web of spells traversed the globe through glittering fiber-optic cable, slender silver threads converging wherever she was, carrying her will across oceans, magic and microchips fusing into a ecstatic new whole. Mom and Dad, finally impressed, finally noticing. Tara, proud and loving at her side-- _I taught her everything I know, but of course she's taken it far beyond..._ The Hellmouth not only sealed but destroyed forever. Buffy wouldn't need to patrol; she could have the normal life she craved, and Willow, she could have...

Anything she wanted. Everything she'd denied herself by remaining in Sunnydale.

Willow squeezed her eyes closed and shuttered her mind and heart. It was only a partnership of convenience. Tonight she'd perform the last of her agreed-upon services and be free. Or mostly free. There was still the minor problem of her own magics being unreliable, and she wasn't so naive as to think that the force she was dealing with would allow her to tap infinite power for the rest of her life without demanding further little agreements. But with the power she had at her disposal, surely she could find or create a spell to fully heal her own abilities. She'd keep her bargain until then, and no longer. It wouldn't take long. She was sure of it.

The front door blew open and Buffy came sweeping in, flinging her purse at the couch and her jacket at the coat rack. Willow, setting the platter of cookies on the coffee table (chocolate macadamia nut, extra forgive-y) was momentarily transformed into a single over-stressed nerve fiber, heartily twanged by the slamming of the door. Her fingers spasmed and the platter slipped from her hands and clattered to the surface of the table. A handful of cookies slid off the edges. "Buffy!"

"At last report." Buffy strode into the living room and planted both fists on her hips, surveying the condition of the battlefield: carpet vacuumed, sofa cushions denuded of cat fur and Miss Kitty banished to the basement, from whence occasional plaintive yowls could be heard. Photos and knickknacks had been dusted and arranged for maximum wholesomeness, Joyce's good tea set arrayed upon the newly-polished surface of the coffee table. Buffy's pearly teeth fastened on her glossy lower lip; there was a tension in her that hadn't been present when Willow left for school that morning. Had the interview gone badly? "I guess it'll have to do," Buffy muttered.

Like you were such a big help cleaning, Willow thought a trifle resentfully. "If you're really worried, Buff, we can do a teensy glamor--"

The look that flashed through Buffy's sea-colored eyes was mildly appalled. "Thanks, but--" Her eyes went flinty grey as they zeroed in on Dawn, galloping downstairs in yet another change of outfit. "Dawn, it's barely three-thirty--why are you home already?" Her face went pinched and shrewish in Unpleasant Buffy Expression #36, and her voice could have cut glass. "This interview's eighty percent of the final as far as The Kroger's recommendation to the judge goes, and you're cutting classes on the very _day_\--"

Dawn did a freeze-frame halfway down the stairs with one foot in mid-air, gearing up for a full-on ear-grating whine. "I am NO--" She cut herself off, dropped her foot to the stair-step and took a deep breath. "No, I'm not," she said in carefully reasonable tones. "They let us out early because there was a demon in the cafeteria. Some kind of snakey thing. It swallowed one of the lunch ladies and went to sleep all over the jocks' table. The janitors were poking it with brooms to see if they could get it to hack her up." She teetered back and forth on the stair-tread, staring at the toes of her sneakers and playing with a lock of her hair. "I know today is important, Buffy."

"Oh." Buffy ran a hand over her forehead and down over her eyes, as if she could wipe the stress-lines off her face. "I mean... I know you know. Sorry. I'm overly caffeinated."

"'sall right," Dawn muttered. She clumped down the remaining stairs, eyes downcast save for one shrewd look at her sister. "He asked you, didn't he?" she said. "And you got into a fight about it, didn't you?" Buffy blinked. For a second there was naked pleading in Dawn's eyes. "I can do it! I'll practice every day--I've been watching both of you, I know some stuff already, sort of--please, let me help!"

"Spike told you about--oh. You mean the fighty stuff." Buffy pressed her fingers to the sides of her nose for a second and turned away. "We'll talk about it later. I'm going to go upstairs and clean up. I'll be back down in a minute."

There was a ground-in weariness of a sort Willow hadn't seen for some time in the drooping lines of Buffy's shoulders as she went up the stairs. Dawn might be off on the details, but Spike had said, back at the crypt, that they'd had a disagreement... come to think of it, she hadn't heard that particular tone of defiant bluster from Spike in quite awhile, either. The voice slipped back into her head, oozing between the cracks in her thoughts like that black oil on the X-Files. This had better end soon; she was running out of creepy similes fast. **_They feed off one another. For good or for ill_**.

The vampire thing considered, Willow hoped that wasn't meant in an ickily literal manner, but she could see the sense of it. There was a connection there, always had been--maybe a Slayer/vampire thing, maybe just a Buffy/Spike thing, more likely a little of both--and while the connection itself couldn't be easily broken, their mutual trust in it, and in each other, was a new and fragile thing. The two of them could tear one another down with the same ease that they'd built one another up, these last few weeks.

**_Just so. A weapon, at need_**.

Willow sat down on the nearest arm of the couch, crossing her arms over her chest and huddling in on herself. She wasn't cut out for this sneaky stuff; she had a horrible urge to race upstairs and spill everything to Buffy, or dash into the kitchen and beg Tara to forgive her for whatever she hadn't done yet. Buffy's psyche was a mass of half-healed wounds that ached at every change of the emotional weather, and the largest and achiest had 'ANGELUS' tattooed on its butt. If she and Spike were already on the outs about something, discovering that the chip was gone might lead Buffy to panic and create a net increase in the quantity of vampire dust in the immediate vicinity before Spike could try to explain.

Assuming Spike even wanted to explain. _Oh, God, what if he went right out and killed someone?_ Her heart started to hammer in her chest and the air in the room grew progressively shorter on oxygen. _What if he grabbed some innocent six-year-old and sucked them dry and--it would be all my fault--it--_

_**How so?**_ the ebony voice asked with crisp disdain. _**You gave him a gift. If he abuses it, that is his folly, not yours.**_

_Yeah, but..._ It was past time she got more information out of Mister Mystery. how_ is what I'm doing for you going to fix the Balance?_

_ **You are an exceptionally intelligent woman. All acts have consequences. Surely you've divined that for yourself by now?** _

Willow fiddled with the teacup. Pink roses in old-fashioned garlands bedecked the sides, below the rim of gold. Curing the crazies was obviously a gold star on the good side of the ledger, and removing their threat to the rest of the population of Sunnydale was even better. Using Dawn to power the spell... well, that was a little iffy. But Dawn wouldn't be hurt by it. That wasn't good or bad, not really, just... pragmatic. Removing Spike's chip...on the surface of it, enabling a vampire to prey upon humanity again was a bad thing. Except, she told herself firmly, Spike wasn't exactly Joe Average Vampire these days. She was just giving him a chance to prove what he'd been saying for months--that he'd changed.

**_You're growing warm_** , the voice replied, amused.

She didn't feel warm. Willow shivered, and went out to the kitchen to help Tara.

*****

Dawn had never quite figured it out. Vampires, no problem. Hellbeasts, nothing to it. Ancient mystic orders bent on world domination, piece of cake. But put Buffy, who could charm and bully equally effortlessly when she was in Slayer mode, in the presence of some mundane authority whom she had to impress, and her sister fell apart like an overcooked macaroni casserole. Of course, that had been before the whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life thing. Post-resurrection Buffy had plodded through the first stage of the guardianship paperwork with grim, listless efficiency. Buffy was neither grim nor listless today--June Cleaver on crack, more like. Dawn wasn't sure which was worse.

Dawn could only guess that the fight with Spike was throwing Buffy off her game. Like, into the next ballpark. She'd been jittery all through the tour around the house, answering questions with flood of too-cheerful babble which would have done Willow proud. Now she perched with ramrod-correct posture on the opposite end of the almost unrecognizably spruce couch--exactly far enough from Dawn and from the arms of the couch to discourage anyone else sitting on it. Despite cosmetic repairs (shoving Volumes 8, 15 and 22 of the 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica underneath the saggiest spot) it had yet to recover from its stint as Vampire Nookie Central, and made frightening sproingy noises if you shifted the wrong way.

The Kroger was seated across the room in the overstuffed armchair, leafing through the pile of paperwork on her lap. She examined each document with excruciating care, as if she hadn't read them all six times before. Dawn was inured to the process by now, but Buffy had yet to build up an immunity. Mrs. Kroger looked up and inquired, "So, Ms. Summers--there are two other adults in the house besides yourself?"

Buffy had changed back into her interview clothes--sensible skirt and blouse and pumps, very respectable, very adult, very, very not-Buffy--and the wide, gleaming smile plastered over her face was scarily reminiscent of Spike's long-disassembled robot version of herself. "Yes. Willow and Tara." One hand escaped from its primly folded station on her lap to flutter in the direction of the kitchen, where Willow and Tara hovered in the doorway, ready to airlift in supplies or fresh troops if necessary, Tara serene in the face of bureaucracy and Willow sporting a pair of small worried lines between her brows. "Because we're the village."

Mrs. Kroger blinked.

The Stepford Slayer smile winked out. "You know, because it takes a village to raise a...uh... cookie?" She thrust the heaping plate of chocolate macadamia-nut at the social worker. "They're homemade." It apparently struck her that this was not necessarily an endorsement of quality, and she amended hastily, "But not by me. Willow made them, totally by herself. Though I'm not saying I can't cook, I can. People just keep asking me not to."

Dawn suppressed a groan and hastened to pour Mrs. Kroger tea from the rose-garlanded teapot. What had happened to the All-Business Buffy who'd railroaded Dad into signing over custody? The argument with Spike must have been a doozy. There had to be something she could say that would come off as well-adjusted and healthy-family-like rather than like a total brown-nosed suck-up. _This teapot. Mom got this teapot from Grandma. And you see that little chip on the foot? I did that when I was eight and pouring tea for Mr. Gordo and Brown Bunny. I'm connected to this teapot. OK, technically as of a year and a half ago I was a blob of green energy with no teapot connections at all, but now I am. Connected. And you can't just--_

"No thank you, dear, I'm trying to cut down." Mrs. Kroger declined the cookies with her usual vague smile and sipped her tea as if to reassure them that she didn't mean anything personal by the refusal. She set the teacup down and pulled a pen from behind one ear. "Let's see... you originally filed your application for guardianship last spring after your mother's death, is that right?" Buffy nodded, a nervous head-bob that made her resemble a dashboard ornament. "Your father was out of the country and unreachable at the time..." She glanced at Buffy with the look of mild inquiry Dawn had grown to dread over the summer. "But the first application was cancelled due to your death?"

"Er." Buffy attempted a light, carefree laugh. "The rumors of my... uh. Yes. But obviously, not dead, so here we go again." Mrs. Kroger pursed her lips at the police reports (touched up after the fact by Willow Rosenberg, hacker extraordinare) and the doctor's affidavit (supplied by a physician with untraceable but persuasive connections with the Council of Watchers, one thing the Council had cooperated on). It all affirmed that Ms. Summers had suffered a head injury in a fall at an abandoned construction site. Ms. Summers had survived the fall and wandered away in a daze before her friends arrived on the scene and summoned the police, all of whom assumed that the small, slight, blonde corpse mangled beyond recognition by the fall was Buffy Summers, until she miraculously appeared on Halloween, having finally recovered her senses.

Dawn watched Mrs. Kroger's eyes flicking back and forth across the close-typed pages. She'd practically memorized the thing; heck, she'd supplied some of the juiciest details of the cover story, and it was all she could do to keep from reciting it under her breath as Mrs. Kroger read through their literary effort. The doctor's report was full of catchy jargon like 'post-traumatic amnesia' and 'flattened affect' and ended with a comforting assurance that Ms. Summers was currently healthy and in full possession of her faculties. So far the Sunnydale tendency not to inquire too deeply into anything that whiffed of weirdness was working for them. "And you don't remember anything about where you were over the summer?"

"No." This was more or less true. Buffy wove the fingers of both hands tightly together once more. "The doctor said it was a post-traumatic... shock... thingy. Is there anything else the judge is going to need to see to transfer my sister's custody back to me? Dad's not contesting--"

"Mmm, yes, I see that. Our main concern is that you don't have a job at present." Mrs. Kroger peered at Buffy over the tops of her glasses. "So--"

"But I'm looking!" Buffy protested, a note of panic peering over the concrete embankments of her good cheer. "I had an interview this morning, and I have two more later this week. I just haven't--"

"I was just going to say," Mrs. Kroger leaned back, her smile growing somewhat fixed, "that your household qualifies for several varieties of government aid."

Buffy, thoroughly derailed for a second, just gaped at her. "You mean... what do you mean?"

"Job counseling services, certainly. Also financial aid services, food stamps--"

"Food stamps? You mean--_Welfare?_ " Buffy got out in a mortified squeak. "Oh. No. I couldn't--I mean, I'm sure we can get by without--I mean--"

"Of course if you find a job in the next few weeks it won't be necessary, but I'm going to leave you the forms just in case." Mrs. Kroger handed Buffy a sheaf of papers, and Buffy took them in a shell-shocked daze, obviously still stunned by the dreaded vision of Buffy Summers, Welfare Mother.

Mrs. Kroger folded up her reading glasses and replaced them in her purse. "You seem to have all your paperwork in order--your hearing is set for the twenty-first. Your father's nominated you as your sister's guardian and waived requirement of service, so--"

The front door shook under a thundering volley of pounding, and the distinctive odor of singed vampire filled the air, temporarily drowning out the cookies. Dawn jumped to her feet, but Willow was ahead of her, sprinting for the door and flinging herself spreadeagled against it, more as if she wanted to hold it shut than in preparation for letting someone in. She opened the door the tiniest of cracks and peered out. "Spike!" she yipped, as if this were the last person she'd expected to see. Well, in the middle of the day, maybe... nah, this was Spike. "We're busy!"

"Ducky. I'm smoldering." Spike applied his superior strength to the door and Willow was scooted backwards across the carpet. Spike elbowed his way through the door and toppled over the threshold, duster pulled over his head, trailing smoke and dirty socks behind him. He dropped his laundry in the foyer with a thump and shrugged his coat back into place with a catlike air of 'I _ meant_ to do that.' He was looking particularly disheveled and human despite the wisps of smoke, and the faint flush in his cheeks meant he'd been feeding very recently. Willow clung to the door, staring at him in round-eyed apprehension, like he had spinach in his teeth or something. Doris Kroger (and everyone else, for that matter) was staring too--though, due to the combination of the duster, the striped pullover, and Spike's usual collection of jewelry no straight man alive or dead ought to be allowed to wear, more in an "Oh my God, look at the fashion victim!" way than in an "Excuse me, why is that man on fire?" way.

Spike had obviously forgotten all about the meeting with Mrs. Kroger. Confronted with the assembly in the living room, he squared his shoulders, flashed his on-the-pull smile at the social worker and rose above his sartorial handicaps by sheer force of charisma. "Hullo, all. Didn't mean to interrupt. Came over to use the washer, and--" His eyes locked onto Buffy's in one of those gazes that excluded the entire rest of the universe. "Something's come up."

Buffy gave the vampire a narrow-eyed once-over to ascertain that, for once, he wasn't engaging in double-entendre, and whipped out the blinding smile again. "Mrs. Kroger, this is Spike." Dawn winced at Mrs. Kroger's sedate blink; undoubtedly 'Spike' ranked number three on the Top Ten List of Bad Boyfriend Names, right below 'Killer' and 'Fang,' though well above 'Ripper' and 'The Butcher.' "Spike...er...Williams. He's...uh..." Buffy's eyes glazed over in critical terminology meltdown; you could see the read/write errors piling up. "We're seeing each other. He was a big help with Dawn over the summer."

"Right," Dawn agreed. "He's always very responsible and law-abiding and--" Buffy elbowed her in the ribs, and Dawn shot a glare at her--_What?_

Spike warmed up the smile and caught Mrs. Kroger's eyes in the we-are-the-world look for a second--which, if Dawn was any judge, thawed The Kroger more thoroughly than a ream of signed testimonials. "Pleased ever so." He bent over and murmured urgently into Buffy's ear, "We really need to talk private-like, pet. Can we--?" He gestured towards the kitchen.

Willow went into a coughing fit which prompted Tara to come over and thump her on the back in concern. Buffy rose briskly to her feet, irritation with Spike setting flight to her earlier nerves. "Spike, in case it's escaped your notice, I'm in the middle of something important." She latched onto his collar and headed for the front door, tugging him after her. "So if you'll just marshal all your lame arguments about the job for later, I'll--"

Dawn frowned. Job? There was way more going on here than some argument over whether or not she could patrol. Buffy was freaking, Willow was freaking, Spike was failing to freak only because outsiders were present and he was hoarding cool points. The vampire dug his heels in and resisted tuggage. "Not about _that_, love. It's important. Very, very important." He was talking to Buffy, but looking at Willow, eyes brimming over with question marks. For a moment Willow's eyes were riveted to the toes of her sandals, but then her head came up defiantly and she smiled, a tight hard smile stuck somewhere between anger and determination. Whatever Spike was asking, she wasn't going to answer.

Buffy, her attention still on Mrs. Kroger's reactions, hadn't noticed the exchange. She nibbled an impeccably manicured thumbnail, obviously coming to the conclusion that there was a slayage emergency--why else would Spike be interrupting now?--which would require her to dash off to the rescue, and simultaneously dash their hopes of Mrs. Kroger making a favorable report to the judge at the custody hearing. Annoyance, resentment and resignation warred in her eyes for a second before resignation won out. "OK," she said at last. "But make it fast." She turned back to Mrs. Kroger. "Would you excuse us for just a moment?"

Another vague blink, in the space of which, Dawn was sure, Spike's height, weight, shoe size, and the exact shade of Clairol Ultra-Light Blond he favored were cataloged and submitted to the Social Services Dubious Associates Database via telepathy. "Certainly. Take your time, Ms. Summers."

"Come on, then, Spike, and let me know what can't wait another hour." Buffy stalked off towards the kitchen, and without looking back waved at the duffle and added, "And bring that with you. The world can live without exposure to your Tigger jammies."

"Oi, now, I don't--" Recalling the presence of The Kroger, Spike clenched his jaw on his intended rejoinder, snatched up his duffle and trotted after her sister. There was an uneasy silence punctuated by the sound of two pairs of feet descending the stairs to the basement, and two voices muffled to inaudibility by intervening layers of drywall and cinder block. Mrs. Kroger sat with plump implacable majesty, her bright starling eyes darting insatiably around the room. Dawn leaned unwarily forward to snag a cookie and the couch SPROINGed at her; guilt froze her in place with one hand outstretched.

Footsteps, ascending. "...don't have _time_ to play around now, Spike!"

Heavier footsteps, booted, following. "Buffy, love, you've got to listen to me! I--"

Lighter feet, halfway up, pausing, turning. Dawn imagined arms folding to the accompaniment of tight-lipped Buffy-disapproval. "What? You what?"

"I--"

Silence. Buffy's voice, sheathed in ice. "Hello, you have reached the end of Buffy Summers's patience. When you actually have anything worthwhile to say, please leave a message at the sound of the beep."

Footsteps, heavier, booted, descending, with something of defeat in their cadence. And lighter feet ascending once more. A second later Buffy emerged from the kitchen, huge fake smile an insufficient mask over too-bright eyes and the angry tremor in her shoulders. Dawn blanched. There was a difference between normal Spike-and-Buffy sniping and a real fight, and this was it--hurt lurking within those eyes instead of irritation. Buffy seated herself upon the couch once more, re-folded her hands, and smiled warmly at Mrs. Kroger, all unease burnt away in the wake of her anger. "I'm so sorry for the interruption. I'm afraid Spike doesn't always take things as seriously as I'd like him to. Now--you said something about job counseling?"

"We need more tea," Dawn whispered, seizing the teapot and heading for the kitchen, heedless of the sofa's agonized complaint. Halfway there she realized she was still carrying her filched cookie, but there wasn't any graceful way to turn around and put it back.

"Dawnie!" Willow grabbed for her wrist as she whooshed past, heading for the basement stairs. "I don't think that's a good idea right now. He sounded pretty cranky, and--"

_Well, duh._ Dawn rolled her eyes. Anyone who went tippy-toes around Spike when he was in a bad mood might as well give up talking to him at all. Willow should know the drill by now. "It's OK. I have a Ph.D. in dealing with cranky vampires." She left the teapot on the kitchen island and racketed down the stairs without slowing; the tawny forty-watt glow of the basement light was brighter than the candlelight in Spike's crypt, and she could take those stairs blindfolded. She made plenty of noise. Spike would hear and smell her coming regardless, but it was only polite to give fair warning when intruding on a sulk. The muted whoosh of the washing machine filling up drifted up to her ears. Spike was slouched in a sunshine-yellow vinyl beanbag chair, remnant of Joyce Summers's swinging 70's days. He leaned back against a pile of flood-damaged boxes, and a handful of styrofoam pellets trickled out through several small tears in the beanbag's sides, reminding Dawn why it had been banished to the basement to begin with.

_Three weeks after they'd first moved to Sunnydale, Mom opening the front door to find Buffy swinging it at a shrieking Dawn's head, and the living room carpet spangled with tiny white pearls..._ Another non-existent memory of her non-existent life. _Everything I remember doing with Spike is real._ She could hold on to that.

Spike left off flinging his remaining clothes into haphazard piles (darks and darkers) as Dawn hopped off the last step of the stairs, and looked up at her with a frustrated snarl. Dawn ignored it. Spike's rages came and went with the force and speed of summer monsoons--by the time you got properly scared, he'd be flipping channels and demanding to know why the bloody hell you were cowering in the corner with a cross clutched over your head. Or you'd be dead. Either way, you might as well skip the cowering. She pulled up a box of her own and sat down. The mildew-stained cardboard sagged beneath her weight. "So. What's the panic? You all right? You look kinda green."

"Your sis does that to me." Spike shot a venomous glance up the stairs, tossed the last pair of monster-goo-encrusted jeans into their proper pile and oozed further down into the beanbag. He let his belt buckle out a notch and closed his eyes. "Nah, I'm fine. Overdid a bit at lunch."

Dawn snickered. "I didn't think that was possible." She extended a magnanimous hand and offered him the cookie. "Want dessert?" There were rules to everything: if you wanted information, ply Buffy with shoes, ply Spike with grease and sugar. At least until you were old enough to ply him with alcohol.

Spike opened one eye, surveyed the cookie with disfavor, and closed it again. "Ha bloody ha. In the future, remind me that ten's my limit." Something about that statement made him snap out of his incipient torpor. Both eyes shot open, blue and cold, and dark brows dipped together over his nose. "Didn't stop me saying that," he muttered. "I had five too many rats for lunch."

"Rats? Yeurch." Dawn curled her tongue in distaste. "I thought rats were, like, too gross even for trailer-park vampire cuisine. Mr. Kohlermann having a pig's blood shortage?"

"Not exactly. Normally I wouldn't touch rat if you paid me, but this was a bit of a special occasion." Spike took a deep breath. "I k--" The word choked off as if someone'd cut off his air; Spike's face contorted and cords of muscle stood out on his neck with the effort, but nothing came out. He slammed a fist into the stack of boxes, panting. "There's got to be a way--" He leaped to his feet and began prowling the basement with frenetic energy.

Pieces clicked into place. "You're under a spell."

Abject gratitude lit Spike's eyes. "Got it in one!"

"A rat-eating spell? Is that why Buffy's all ticked off? Lips that touch rat will never touch mine?"

"Gah. No!" He stopped and smacked his fist into his palm. "Pen and paper!"

Dawn cast about for a second. "Oh! Wait!" She dove into one of the boxes and emerged with a tattered cigar box full of broken crayons and desiccated Magic Markers. She shoved it at Spike. "Here."

Spike grabbed a red crayon and dropped to his knees, scribbling out on the flap of one of the cardboard boxes 'I CAN KX##~~...' "Fuck!" he snarled and began again. 'W!77oooH TOK Th~^v^v...' "ARRRGGGHH!!!" Spike smashed the box to flinders, scattering mis-matched Legos and a selection of headless, chewed-on Barbie dolls across the floor, and knelt in the wreckage, chest heaving.

"Okay, you can't talk about it or write about it," Dawn said, trying to project calm. "Can you nod yes or no? It's something you need to tell Buffy, right?"

The vampire tensed and nodded. Lightning failed to strike. "Now we're getting somewhere," Dawn said, rubbing her hands. "Is it dangerous?" Spike hesitated, brows twisting, and raked both hands through his already-unruly hair. At last he nodded. "Is it happening soon?" Headshake. "A long time from now?" Another headshake, accompanied by rising frustration in his eyes. "It's already happened?" Vigorous nod. "Is it something Buffy needs to do something about?"

Again a hesitation, but before Spike could determine which answer he wanted to give, the door at the top of the stairs opened and Willow stood backlit in the opening. "Do you two have something to share with the class?"

*****

_Dumb, Willow._ She should have known trying to scare Dawn off talking to Spike wouldn't work; Dawn had never been properly afraid of the vampire even when he'd been dangerous. And she couldn't exactly hint that he wasn't un-dangerous any longer. She stared at the uninformative surface of the basement door with one hand on the cool worn brass of the doorknob and twisted another knot in the flowered gauze of her skirt. Her fingers tightened, and the knob turned.

"Do you two have something to share with the class?"

Two pairs of blue eyes, one large and warm, one narrow and chill, gazed up at her. Haloed in the light of the bare bulb, Dawn sat enthroned in cardboard, arms folded across her bony knees and her face rapt with the bizarre game of Twenty Questions she was conducting. Spike was pacing like Rilke's panther, caught mid-turn as Willow opened the door. Dawn scrambled to her feet, her upturned face blossoming with a smile of relief at sight of Willow. Spike looked up as well, but there was no smile in his eyes, only wariness. "Willow!" Dawn cried. "Just who we need to see. Spike's under some kind of spell and he can't talk about it but there's something important he needs to tell Buffy, and--"

A rivulet of perspiration trickled down her temple, stinging in the corner of her eye. She couldn't do this. Willow Rosenberg had never told a successful lie in her life, she was worse at it than Spike was, she wasn't cut out for sneaky--

Willow raised a hand, feeling the rush as her eyes went onyx. "Dawn," she said softly, "Be still."

She couldn't handle sneaky. But as she'd slowly come to recognize over the last few years, she could handle power. The girl froze in place, her lanky adolescent form half-way to standing, her eager mouth open. Dawn, interrupted.

Spike took one look and all the muscles in his shoulders bunched; he whipped round to face up the stairs, both hands clenched on the bannisters, seeming all of a sudden a great deal larger than he really was. The ice-chips of his eyes bored into Willow's, full of fury--but more puzzlement. "Will," he growled, sandpaper-rough, "what the fuck are you doing? Why won't you let me tell Buffy about--" He gestured at his head. "What've you done to Dawn?"

"Nothing," she said, harder and faster than she wanted to. "Nothing. She's fine. Just... stopped for a minute. Do you really think I'd hurt her?"

Spike's cheeks hollowed. He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans and rocked heel to toe, saying nothing for rather longer than was comfortable. "I'd've said no, yesterday."

Willow felt heat rise in her own face. "Well, I wouldn't!" she snapped. "I just don't want anyone to know I took your chip out. I've got my reasons, all right?"

"Feel a bit less dodgy if I knew what they were. Now Buffy thinks I've wandered over to cock up her tea party on a lark, and I can't tell her different." The anger in his eyes was layered over an inner bruising. "If you've messed me up for good with her, Red, I swear I'll--"

Cue scary background music--Spike's Theme, menace in a minor key. "What, kill me?" Her voice was too shrill, and Willow forced it to a lower register. "Come after me with a broken bottle? Doesn't take you long to fall off the wagon, does it, Spike?" She felt a twinge of anger not her own in the back of her skull: her silent partner hadn't liked her saying that--why? The power surged up within her, wordless reminder that she no longer needed to fear Spike in any sense.

He flinched and dropped his eyes--was the surfeit of blood in his system at the moment enough to justify the shamed tinge of red at his eartips? "Wouldn't do that," he muttered. "Not to you. Not nowadays." He met her eyes once more. "You understand that, don't you, Will? It's not...I just wouldn't." There was a subtle note of pleading in his voice.

_ **You have no need to play on this creature's shame or his sympathy for your own safety. Neither of which qualities he has any real claim on.** _

"I know." Willow kept her own voice level in the face of another flare of anger from her invisible companion. It could just suffer; it needed her, or it wouldn't have gone to all this trouble to get her. She could afford to test her bounds a little. She and Spike had always gotten along, give or take an assault or two; there'd been a time when his assurance that she was bite-worthy had delivered a real ego-boost right alongside the abject terror. "Mrs. Kroger's leaving at five-thirty and we're going to go over to the Magic Box and meet the others at six to go over the crazy-catching plan. Go on up and I'll unfreeze Dawn."

The planes of his face shifted as he gazed up at her, demon-ridges coming to prominence. A thought-swift blur of motion and Spike was beside her on the stair. Willow had time to draw half a startled gasp before the cool weight of his hand fell on her shoulder. She jerked her head up to meet the lambent golden eyes only inches away from her own, the pupils flashing red in the dim light. His voice rasped against her ear like a cat's tongue. "Anyone else pulled this with me," he murmured, "Or with _her_," he jerked his head down the stairs towards Dawn, "and they'd be picking my teeth out of their jugular by now. You might want to think about that."

It wasn't even a threat. Just a statement of fact, one of Spike's not-so-subtle reminders: _Hello, vampire_. God, those fangs were terrifying up close, inch-long upper canines, half-inch lower canines, rip-saw rows of incisors in between...she'd seen what teeth like that, powered by inhuman muscle, could do to human flesh, seen mangled bodies and bloodless faces in the corridors of Sunnydale High. _ They had fun._ What did it say about the infinite capacity of the human mind to trivialize that her primary reaction these days was _Wonder how long Spike had to practice talking through those things to get rid of the game-face lisp?_

"You can't kill me, Spike," she said, a little breathless with the enormity of the realization. _Hello, incredibly powerful witch._ "You couldn't even if you wanted to." Spike's eyes reflected the truth of her words, made her reckless. "But I could kill you. And I haven't. Instead I gave you a nice early Christmas present. You might want to think about that."

For once, Spike's face was unreadable. "I will, Red. I will." He turned, his features sliding back towards humanity again, and walked up the stairs. The open door framed him in light for a moment and he looked down at her. "You really would have made a smashing vampire." Then he was gone. Willow sagged against the railing with a little whoop of hysterical laughter . She couldn't afford to give in to it for long. She straightened and trotted downstairs.

She halted among the remnants of the Summers girls' childhood, gazing at the motionless figure of Dawn and nudging red and yellow plastic bricks aside with the toe of the Birkenstocks. What now? Things were moving too fast, events banging into each other, bumper cars out of control. Dawn had figured out too much for comfort; should she erase the memory of her conversation with Spike? There was Lethe's bramble in her room upstairs, and the spell was a simple one. She could run up and get it now, and hope no one came down here while she was gone. Or she could let Dawn tell her everything, and pretend to investigate... Willow groaned; she could see this devolving into a farce all too quickly. _Why is it so important no one know I took Spike's chip out?_

The dark voice within was silent. It had said all it really needed to say; do these things, and power is yours; refuse and I take it away. Except she wasn't doing it for the power, and why did that sound as lost and uncertain in her own ears as Spike's _I wouldn't do that, not nowadays?_ Willow ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. She couldn't think about that now. There were too many ways Spike could get around the spell she'd laid on him. Unless... she laughed, relief washing over her. She could erase _his_ memory! She should have thought of that before. He couldn't tell anyone how the chip came out if he didn't know.

Buffy was still grilling Mrs. Kroger about job prospects in the living room when Willow slipped past and ran upstairs and into her and Tara's room. She grabbed the bouquet of herbs in the jar on the dresser--tansy and heal-all, fennel and columbine; there's rosemary, that's for remembrance; we need the opposite of that--and extracted the sprig of bramble. Purple bristles on a faded green stem, prickly to the touch. Clutching it in one damp palm she stole downstairs once more.

No one looked at her. Spike was in the living room now, exerting his charm, such as it was, on Mrs. Kroger, while Buffy looked on with the air of the Russian judge about to award his performance a 6.5. Willow slipped past, back to the wall. Tara gave her a worried look as she raced through the kitchen, but Willow smiled and waved and mouthed 'Getting Dawn!' and was down the basement stairs before she could be questioned.

The sweet musty odor of the herb filled the basement as she crumbled it beneath Dawn's nose and whispered, "Obliviscere." The broken fragments caught fire in her palm, consumed by cold blue witchlight. Power tingled and sparked in the air around them, rising like embers on the smoke of the burning. Dawn's nose twitched. Willow lifted her hand again. "Dawn, ferre!"

Dawn sneezed and lurched into motion, immediately lost her balance, and staggered into the beanbag chair, cracking both kneecaps on the floor. "Ow!" she yelled, rolling over and clutching her knees. She looked up from her hedgehog-ball of pain to see Willow staring down at her and her cheeks went red. "I tripped on something," she said with a defensive hair-toss. "Not normally Superklutz." She sat up and rubbed the worst-bruised knee. "Ow... why am I in the basement?" One hand went to the back of her head in a tentative search for painful lumps, always the first possibility in Sunnydale when one found oneself in a strange place with memory loss. When her fingers found nothing, she grabbed the nearest box and levered herself to her feet. "Omigod, Mrs. Kroger! How long have I been down here? Buffy'll slay me!"

"Not long," Willow reassured her, extending a helping hand. "You came down to check on Spike's washing." She walked over to the machine and held up a small plastic scoop half-full of blue liquid. "See? Forgot the fabric softener, and you know how hard he takes laundry mishaps." She opened the lid and poured the Downy into the reservoir. "You didn't come back up right away, so Willow to the rescue. Mrs. Kroger's still upstairs."

Dawn stood rubbing her head for a moment. "I should get back."

She leaped deerlike for the stairs, and Willow shouted after her, "Dawnie! Wait! How would you like to go along with us tonight? Just to make with observiness?"

"Really?" Dawn paused on the stairs, looking stunned, for real this time. "You've got to be kidding. Didn't Buffy totally freak out when Spike asked her--" She frowned, confusion welling up in her eyes as her thoughts ran into the blurry, ragged edges of missing places in her mind. Willow watched closely; it was the nature of the human mind to fill in gaps--she'd learned that in the part of the psych class before the professor had gone insane. It was so easy to coax a mind into filling in the blanks... "Spike and Buffy had a fight," Dawn said with more confidence. "About me learning to patrol. I came down here to talk to him about it." She frowned. "And the laundry, I guess."

"That was a good excuse," Willow said. "Look, I'm completely with Spike on this. Sunnydale's a dangerous place full of dangerous beasties, so Dawn with the kung-fu grip? Great idea. Hence the invite."

Dawn bit her lip, tempted. "Won't Buffy have a spaz fit?"

Willow grinned. At least something was going to be easy. "What Buffy doesn't know won't hurt us. I can disguise you so you won't be in any danger. Sort of a variation on the glamor spells Buffy's using to patrol incognito, except it'll just make you..."

"Invisible?"

"No, too many side effects. Just unnoticeable. You know, like _Hitchhiker's Guide?_ A Someone Else's Problem field. Villainous types can see you, they just won't think you're important. Heroic types likewise."

Dawn considered this, her eyes lighting up and an answering grin spreading across her face. "Sounds cool. When do we do it?"

Willow pretended to think about it. "Meet me down here after Mrs. Kroger leaves. I'll cast the spell, and make sure you get into the car when we drive over, and don't get any doors slammed on you. Once we're at the Magic Box, if you just hover and don't say anything, no one will realize you're there. You can watch the whole thing, get a good first-hand look at the crack world-saving team in action. Sound good?"

"Sounds fantastic," Dawn crowed, whatever minor worries she'd had about her lapse lost in the excitement of the new plan. "I'd better get up there, before Buffy implodes. See you later!"

As the younger girl dashed off up the stairs, Willow's sight doubled for an instant and instead of Dawn's familiar coltish grace she saw an intricate mandala of green, shimmering and pulsing in the darkness. Power. As much power as she herself was now tapped into, but fallow, useless--the engines of Creation, harnessed to a go-cart.

Tonight she'd change that.

She walked over to the washing machine and leaned into it, folding her arms and pillowing her head on its vibrating surface. Another mission accomplished. It was all coming together. Whatever was to occur tonight would steady the teetering Balance, and save Buffy from whatever obscure but doubtless unpleasant fate awaited the person who'd upset it... Willow Rosenberg, Big Gun, would have saved the day once again.

Maybe, for once, she'd get a thank you.


	27. Chapter 27

Sunset, viewed from the doorstep of Cabin 5 of the Coronado Del Sol Motor Hotel, smog-tainted gold etched with contrails in purple and silver. Tanner stared upwards, trying to wrest meaning from the runic lines before the wind smudged them to illegibility. A shadow fell between him and the cryptic sky: a woman, thirty-five or so, tall and hunch-shouldered over the armload of packages clutched to her thin chest. Not beautiful, and her mud-brown, stubby-lashed eyes would never benefit from coming out from behind her glasses. But they were kind, as was her voice when she walked over and looked at him--at him, not past him, as so many people did--and said Edith Keeler's three most important words.

Tanner smiled and shook his head. She returned the smile (a little nervous, as much relieved as not) and moved on. He lurched to his feet, reached out, whispered the right words in the right order, and plunged his fingers into the back of her skull, through the thin straight mouse-brown hair. She sank to her knees with a wounded sigh, and the packages tumbled to the sidewalk. The outer skin of her mind was taut with longing and long-abandoned desire, the interior bursting with emotions sweet and warm as sun-ripened nectarines.

He thought about taking her with him, making her one of them. But she had looked at him, not through him, and so he left her drooling in the doorway, propped against the peeling turquoise door. The Coronado Del Sol charged by the hour; hopefully no one would mistake her for one of the regulars, but if they did, he told himself cynically, perhaps it wouldn't be entirely unwelcome.

He shuffled over to the newspaper kiosk on the curb, bending to squint at the date on the headlines. Monday, December 10th. Fourteen shopping days until Christmas. Twelve days since the eyeless man had promised him healing for his charges, eleven days since he'd passed the slippery black burden he'd carried on to the Red Witch. Eleven days since he'd been dropped like a jilted lover.

Across the street, a seven-foot man with skin the color of verdigris and hair and beard of winter-brown oak leaves strode past the line of storefronts, passing windows full of fake snow and Christmas sale signs. The leaf-shaped bronze head of his spear clove through Gordian knots of shoppers, who stepped back, and stared, and decided it was a promotional stunt.

Gods stalked the streets of Sunnydale. In such times, a mortal madman could plot revenge against a force of nature with some chance of success. Tanner watched the Green Man disappear into the twilight and pulled a grimy spiral notebook from his coat pocket. He started walking, feet placed just so on the cracked old sidewalk, in time with the syncopated blink of Christmas lights. He filled page upon page with cabalistic scrawls as he walked, jotting down portents in the random territorial scrawls on dumpsters, the secret patterns gleaned from decaying brickwork in the alleyways. The spider's web of electrical lines overhead intersected at angles mirroring the message of the contrails, and he recorded it all painstakingly.

He halted at the corner of Main and Wilkins, where spray-painted symbols ringed the manhole cover in the center of the intersection, hieroglyphs in neon orange and electric blue revealing the paths of municipal ley lines: electricity and gas, sewer and telephone lines. They could tell other stories for those who knew how to listen. Tanner dropped to his hands and knees on the oil-slick asphalt, palms splayed across the gritty-greasy composite, and squinted, shifting position until the dashes and arrows aligned.

Concentration was key. A thousand one, a thousand two, counting off the seconds as the traffic lights overhead flashed from green to yellow, from yellow to red. He counted through five reds to be sure, averaging them out in his head. _Twenty-three. Twenty-three now. Twenty-one last week._ Tanner huddled over his notebook pocket and scribbled down the times, along with a few scrawled sketches. Constellations of neon signs, Christmas decorations and traffic lights swung into alignment, and his shoulders trembled under the weight of the knowledge thus vouchsafed.

Last night he'd collapsed screaming in the 24-hour Denny's up on Sixth, clutching his head and rolling under table as light poured into this brain. The waitress with the mole on her chin had called 911, but he'd dragged himself to his feet and staggered laughing into the night before the police could arrive, into a darkness vibrating with anticipation, every piece of steel and concrete eager to whisper its secrets in his ear. Sunnydale was the event horizon surrounding the singularity of the Hellmouth. Last night, that singularity had briefly inverted itself, radiating light instead of hoarding darkness. That light had revealed to him the shape of his vengeance. All he needed was the right time, and the means to draw his enemy into the trap.

It would happen again. Before the New Year, definitely. Christmas? Or would the older nexus of power around the solstice draw events to it? Tanner clambered to his feet, wincing at the gravel-pocks in his knees and elbows. He stood on the curb, chafing his arms with his hands. A week, two weeks--more observations were needed. Precision was essential.

In the meantime, he had other responsibilities. He sighed. Lizzie was dead, and the drifter they'd found under the park bench to replace the vampire and his friend had never emerged from his stupor. One caretaker gone, one more helpless mouth to feed. He ticked off the names in his mind: Dana, Blondie and Blue were rebuilding the circle in Weatherly Park. Ramon and Jim and Matches and Carmel were meeting him near the Wal-Mart, where they'd pool the money they'd panhandled earlier in the day and buy supplies for the encampment.

Tanner turned left on Inverarity and headed for the Wal-Mart, passing the alley that sometimes led to Rack's place. Half a dozen pairs of eyes even more desperate and hollow than his own followed him. He'd have given them the oblivion they paid for free, but they had nothing left that even he would want. No, he needed fresh meat. Two, three minds if they could manage it, strong ones who might hold on to a few scraps of reason afterwards. Maybe that would be enough to get The Rabbit Guy and the others back at the encampment on their feet for awhile.

And then... then a little trip down to the caverns, to pay a visit to the eyeless men.

*****

Being invisible might give you a feeling of power and freedom. Dawn didn't know, never having been invisible. Being unnoticeable was just plain creepy. The hurried spell Willow'd cast on her had involved a clipboard, a spider's web, and her yearbook photo. Willow clipped the photo to the board, detached the web carefully from between the rungs of the broken chair in the garage and laid it across the photo, and chanted a few lines from "The Waste Land" while applying a thick layer of hairspray which affixed the web to the photo and blurred the photo into unrecognizeability. "Carry it," she said, thrusting the sticky board into Dawn's arms, "and look busy. If anything happens and you need to be the center of attention, just drop the clipboard. That'll end the spell, so be extra sure you want the noticement before you do it."

So Dawn held on to the clipboard, feeling like a complete idiot, and edged through the front door and out onto the lawn along with everyone else. Buffy and Tara stepped around her on the way to the driveway with vague murmured apologies: _Excuse me, please_, and that was it. She piled into the back seat of the SUV with Willow, and Tara didn't even ask why she was being scrunched into a corner. Even when they came to an unexpected stop in the middle of an intersection in the wake of her sister's split-second decision not to run the yellow after all, and she thumped against the back of the driver's seat, her presence remained a non-event.

Xander and Anya were already at the Magic Box when they got there, along with Giles, who was still poring over a two-foot stack of Watcher's journals and treatises on the Balance. He got to his feet as they came in and adjusted his glasses, and took Buffy aside to show her something in one of the books. Buffy nodded her terse little Scarlett O'Hara I'll-deal-with-that-later nod and took up her station in front of the ladder to the restricted section of the Magic Box's library, one fist cocked against her hip. Dawn gripped her clipboard and weighed her odds of grabbing a seat at the research table--would someone try to sit on her? Probably not, but... Buffy glanced around the room, looking right at Dawn, and right past her. Xander and Anya and Tara, taking their own seats at the research table, ditto. They knew she was here. She just didn't matter. In a spirit of perversity, she reached over Giles's shoulder, in plain sight of everyone, and closed the book in front of him.

If she'd been invisible, there'd have been whooping and hollering and who-did-thats. As it was, Giles just made a little noise of annoyance and opened the book up again. Dawn backed away from the table and hugged herself, digging her fingers into the muscle of her arm to reassure herself she was still real. She'd had nightmares like this, where she bobbed through the world like a balloon, unable to touch anything, or dissolved slowly into green light. An encouraging little smile from Willow was all that kept her from dropping the clipboard and giving it up right then.

"OK, gameplan," Buffy said. She really ought to have had a blackboard full of circles and arrows and a pointer, but she was making do with the Fun In Sunnydale map put out by the Chamber of Commerce (Brought to you by the Espresso Pump and Aunt Nettie's Antique Boutique!) and a wooden yardstick. "All the attack locations Willow was able to track down in the newspaper archives and the hospital files are here." She tapped the off-center scattering of red push-pins with the tip of the yardstick. All within a mile or so of Weatherly Park, which is where they've got their little Picnic Table of Doom set up. Their main base is here--" she waved at an area a foot or so to the left of the map, "--at the dump. We could try to catch them there, but not loving the idea of taking them on their home ground."

Or the idea of garbage-related booby-traps, Dawn thought. Buffy had changed into low-heeled boots, but was otherwise still wearing her interview clothes. But Buffy was probably right to avoid the dump--she knew from the times she'd accompanied Spike on his scavenging expeditions over the summer that it was a maze of trash-hills and valleys, way too easy to disappear in. She cleared her throat loudly and Anya looked around, then turned back to Buffy. _Don't say 'disappear.'_

"None of the newspaper stories mention the victims being ganged up on," Buffy continued, "and we know Tanner was alone when he slurped on Willow's head. It looks like it's strictly table for one when he's just recharging his own batteries. It's only when he needs to juice up the whole commune that they all Junkyard Commando and take prisoners." She clasped the yardstick behind her back. "Tanner's the only really dangerous one in the bunch--once he's out of the picture we can turn the rest of them over to the authorities. So what we're going to do is try to catch him and neutralize his powers." A gesture at the door to the alley. "Spike's out moving the dumpsters to block off the alley. Will, you and Tara set up your spells there."

"We're good to go," Willow said, patting her bag with a witchy grin. She'd already gotten some of the stuff out, Dawn noticed; in her other hand she held a sprig of some prickly purple thistle-looking herb, rolling it back and forth between her thumb and forefinger. "And nobody's eaten anything since lunch, right? Because if you cheated on the fasting part, you _will_ be sorry." She gave Xander a meaningful look, which he studiously ignored. Dawn wondered if Spike's rat buffet counted against him, and then frowned. Rats? Where had that thought come from? Spike couldn't eat rats; the chip wouldn't let him.

Buffy nodded without returning Willow's grin. "Giles, you'll be helping Willow?" Subtle difference there, Dawn noted; the others got ordered; Giles got asked. He nodded confirmation and Buffy plowed forward. "Xander, you and Anya will take your car and cruise Lincoln." She thwapped the street leading to the dump with the tip of the yardstick. "Spike and I will go on foot and scope out the side streets, maybe do a little standard patrolling. Anya, you've got your cell, right?" Anya held up the sleek black device and nodded. "If you catch sight of any of the crazies, give me a call. If we sight them, we'll call you." Buffy patted her purse; one of the money-saving strategies of The Budget had been cancelling their long-distance service and getting a pay-per-call cell phone plan. Dawn stifled a sigh of relief that she hadn't picked today to borrow it to keep up with the Shanias and Tiffanys at school. With all the excitement of the afternoon she'd've totally forgotten to put it back.

"Once we've got them in our sights, Spike and I'll cut Tanner away from the herd and drive him back towards the alley," Buffy went on, doing a General Patton turn in front of the map. It struck Dawn with less-than-pleasant force that she took her right to argue with older-sister-Buffy for granted; from the attentive looks everyone was aiming in older sister's direction, arguing with Slayer-Buffy wasn't an option. "He can't suck Spike's brain, so Spike's in no danger from him. Spike can block him and I can hit him if he tries to give us trouble. We'll get him and as many of the others as we can to the alley. Tara will do her magic-grounding thing and render him all fluff-puppy harmless, and then--"

The back door to the shop opened and Spike slunk in, head down, hands buried in the pockets of his increasingly-battered duster. He started for the table and stopped... well, dead, eyes fixed on the thistle-y herb cradled in Willow's hand. Without saying a word, he backed off and took up a watchful stance against the bookshelves. Dawn was overcome with the conviction that there was something weird going on. Spike kept darting little glances at Buffy and half opening his mouth, then lapsing back into unhappy silence. Every now and then a Buffy-ward glance would get diverted, and he'd blink and turn in Dawn's direction for a moment, brow knit. Then he'd look away again: _No one I know, no one I need bother with._ Willow'd done good; spells geared to work on humans didn't always cover a vampire's keener senses, and spells intended to influence living brains didn't always cover undead ones, as they'd discovered with the whole Ben/Glory switcheroo business. If Spike thought she wasn't worth watching, neither would any other random vampire they might run into. At the same time it was stupidly comforting that he noticed her at all.

"--we round up the rest of them so Willow can do her mass cure thing. Any questions?" Buffy asked, turning expectant eyes on everyone in turn. "Comments? Lavish praise?"

"What if we don't find them?" Anya asked.

Buffy grimaced. "Next step, braving the Sunnydale landfill. That it? Then let's rumble."

"Don't forget you're not yourself tonight," Tara said, holding up a small make-up mirror with a photo of a non-descript woman taped to it. Buffy grimaced again; one-two punch in the old vanity, Dawn thought with a snicker, but Buffy submitted to Tara's casting the glamor without further argument. Disguise in place, she caught Spike's eye and beckoned him after with a lift of her chin, the imperious gesture looking very odd on the illusory middle-aged face she was wearing. Whatever they were fighting about, Buffy wasn't going to let it interfere with slaying business. Spike unfolded himself and followed her, but he still looked troubled.

Dawn rested her chin on the top of her clipboard and frowned. The exchange reeked of eau de peculiar. A day that went by without Buffy and Spike arguing about something was as rare as snowfall in Sunnydale, so why should this squabble in particular bother him? She felt like there was something she was forgetting...

"Hey, Dawnie." Willow's fingers caught Dawn's sleeve as she started after the others. "Maybe it would be better if you hung with me and Giles and Tara," she whispered. "All the action's going to go down right here in our very own alley."

Dawn thought about it--real serious thought; she didn't have weapon, and she had to hold onto the dorky clipboard or the spell would fade. Not an ideal setup for self-defense. Still, if she'd wanted to spend the night sitting in an alley waiting for something to happen, she could have stayed home and hoped Mrs. Andrevich's tomcat would get caught by the automatic sprinklers again. And what was the point of a don't-notice-me spell if she stayed where no one would notice her anyway? "I thought the idea was for me to observe a patrol. They're just going after ordinary guys," she whispered back. "Ordinary guys I already outsmarted once. It's not like we're up against brain-eating zombies or even vampires. And anyway I'm just going to watch."

Willow's eyes shifted to the back of Tara's head and back again. "Yeah, but--"

The tail of Spike's duster was fast disappearing out the front door; if she didn't hurry, it'd be impossible to catch up. She might not have been on a real patrol before, but she'd been on the periphery of several of Spike's impromptu demon-killings over the summer, and she'd held her own last week. It wasn't like she was crippled or anything. "Don't worry. I'll be careful. You and Xander used to patrol all the time before you put on the pointy hat. And hey, maybe I can bonk someone over the head with the clipboard." Dawn waved and scooted after Spike and her sister.

The bright breezy day had ushered in a cold damp evening. The streetlamps were burning sodium-pink holes in the darkness and the chill had fangs enough to bite through thin California sweaters. Out on the sidewalk in front of the Magic Box, Dawn looked right and left, her long hair whipping around her face. She caught sight of Spike's white-blond head, already half-way down the block, tucked the clipboard under one arm and took off running. It was impossible that Spike and Buffy didn't hear her coming, but she didn't even draw an incurious look. Dawn slowed and caught her breath, hanging back as they turned and headed south on Laramie, parallel to Lincoln.

This was one of the oldest parts of town. Shops alternated with old-fashioned apartments and the occasional revenant house, single-story, palm-shaded bungalows dating back to the twenties. Dawn could feel the tiny hard nuts of queen palms rolling under the soles of her sneakers. Disadvantages to the plan were becoming evident. There had to be tricks to patrolling, things she should be learning. Signs of demonic activity, likely vampire hideouts--clues!

The problem was, Spike and Buffy weren't obligingly narrating their adventures. As far as slaying went, they'd gone all Quest for Fire the minute they were out the Magic Box door, communicating via grunts and significant glances. Buffy touched Spike's elbow, he nodded, and the two of them dissolved into the shadows so quickly and completely that Dawn could have sworn it was magic.

She stood there on the dark street in heart-thudding panic for a minute, until the sounds of an off-stage scuffle reassured her that no random dimensional portals were involved. In another minute the two of them strolled out of the bushes, brushing vamp dust from their sleeves while Buffy grumbled about grass stains, and continued down the street as if nothing had happened. Another time Spike nudged Buffy, who shook her head. They moved on, kicking palm nuts off into the grass and leaving Dawn mystified as to what they'd noticed and why it wasn't worth checking out further.

Worse, in between alarms, the two of them were deep in a Serious Couple Talk--or maybe a Serious Couple Lecture was a better description. Buffy was delivering an impassioned rant, and Spike was prowling alongside with frustration pouring off him in waves.

"...fine for _you_ to be all rebel without a pulse, but I've got to play by the rules or I lose Dawn. And showing up to lure me into the basement for a quickie, _not_ helpful. In fact--"

There was a brief flare of light, followed by the nose-twitching scent of burning tobacco. Oh, great, Dawn thought with disgust, on top of everything else she was going to be trailing along breathing Spike's smoke. Gah. She dropped back another pace. Spike broke into Buffy's monologue with an exasperated jab of his cigarette. "May be hard for you to credit, but I don't spend every waking moment plotting to get into your knickers. Not exactly the mystery of the ages what you keep in 'em any longer."

Dawn couldn't see her sister's face, but she recognized the twitch of Buffy's shoulders, the little flinch that said someone had gotten in a body blow. "Oh. Really," she said, perfectly flat.

Spike turned on his heel as casually as that, and put a fist through the plate glass window of Funkadelic Threads. Dawn jumped back with a startled yip as cracks spiderwebbed out to the corners of the window and a glittering shower of glass rained to the sidewalk, leaving a cantaloupe-sized hole right between _Big **Big****BIG** Christmas Savings!_ and _25% Off Selected Sweater Sets_. "Sod it, Buffy," he snarled, "I didn't mean it that way and you know it!"

Buffy folded her arms across her chest and curled her lip, her tone as bitter as the alum a five-year-old Dawn had once mistaken for powdered sugar. "That's right, I forgot--women fascinate you for their minds. Like Drusilla--oh, wait, she lost hers. Or Harmony--oh, wait, she never had one to begin with."

"Or Buffy Summers, who smothered hers beneath the weight of her massive throbbing insecurity." Spike's cigarette arced through the night, hit the concrete and exploded into orange sparks. He grabbed Buffy's shoulders and slammed her up against the stucco. "Look, you stupid bint, I fucking adore you, I'd take you against the sodding wall this very minute, and if you can't get that through your solid ivory skull I'll pound it in with Maxwell's silver bloody hammer, but I didn't come over this afternoon for a shag! I needed to tell you--"

His words cut off in a pained grimace--chip shock, from the push? It didn't matter, because in two seconds flat Buffy'd grabbed him right back, pulled him down, and started sucking his face hard enough to strip chrome off a bumper. Spike vamped out and ground his hips into Buffy's hard enough to make the window rattle in its frame and then the two of them were writhing and moaning and slobbering all over each other.

Dawn spun around and started back the way she'd come, sticking her fingers in her ears and walking as fast as she could go without actually breaking into a run. Oh, God, vampire-and-illusion-clad-Slayer wall sex. She so didn't need to see this. Or hear it, or have it pop up in conversation with her therapist twenty years from now. Joking with Tara about what was going on in the next room was one thing, but this was way too raw, way too personal, and there were some things about her sister that she really didn't want to know. Right back to the Magic Shop and the nice safe lesbians for this little black duck.

Behind her Spike gasped, "Who was that, pet?" and Buffy's voice, muffled, answered, "There was a who?"

*****

She absolutely hadn't intended it to get this far, Buffy reminded herself. This wasn't just some routine patrol, it was a Mission. And it wasn't some dark alley or deserted rest stop, it was right in the middle of a very public street. And her period was still in full swing, which made for a logistical problem, or had until Spike disposed of it along with her underwear (and we are _ not_ adding that to the permanent collection, are we, Mr. The Bloody?) and besides, it was _cold_. But there he was, all snarly and ravenous for her, and all of a sudden she'd gone from stepping up to the plate to sliding for home without passing any intervening bases.

46 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the time and temperature sign over by the bank, which meant Spike was hovering somewhere around 50, if he kept moving. And he was moving, oh God was he moving, driving into her over and over, let's hear it for friction, people! Her thighs scissored his flanks, her heels drummed against the small of his back. Stucco bits dug poky fingers into her shoulders, snagging her hair with each thrust while Spike growled ecstatic, half-intelligible filth into her ear. She wanted to whisper to him, too, tell him how he made her feel--wanton, liberated, terrified. Tell him he was beautiful. Tell him what she wanted to do to him, wanted him to do to her. All that came out was "Uhn, uhn, uhn, UHN!" Luckily Spike had a Ph.D. in translating incoherent Buffy-noises. Vision dissolved into white haze, pressure built to volcanic levels: _Harder, faster, deeper, harder, harder, _harder...

The world exploded in a colorless blaze. Buffy's body went bow-taut, slamming into the wall and clenching around him; Spike threw his head back and came with a triumphant howl, emptying himself into her in long wringing spasms. They slumped against the wall, bodies twitching and shivering like racehorses after a match. Spike's breathing grew shallow and irregular again as he remembered it wasn't really required of him, and Buffy's legs unwound from his waist and reluctantly took up the task of bearing her own weight. Thank God for oversized dusters and unseemly haste; they'd neither of them peeled off more than the absolute minimum amount of clothing necessary to get Tab A into Slot B. Anyone passing by would see a disheveled but not obviously indecent pair. Buffy blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. "So... uh... that was you, seducing me from my duty with your sinister attraction, right?"

Spike chuckled. "Don't think you gave me much seducing time, pet. What say I give it a try now?"

Slowly, he withdrew and sank to his knees before her, cool fingers trailing down her belly, across the trembling muscles of her thighs. His lips, still warm from their initial frantic kisses, moved over her sex-flushed skin, and then his long agile tongue flicked out, teasing shivers from her. Tentative licks at first, then long sure muscular strokes alternating with butterfly-touches and little blunt-toothed nips, following the tributaries of crimson and silver up her thighs to the source, until it plunged into the welling heart of her personal Nile.

She thought he came again when she did, just from the taste of her, but it was impossible to be sure, what with the near-blacking-out with pleasure and all. She had the dim sense that she really ought to be a lot more shocked and horrified at herself, but Bad Buffy had seized temporary control of Buffy-Brain Central and Good Buffy appeared to be locked in the supply closet. Spike was still kneeling, arms locked around her hips, cheek pillowed against her belly so that her whole body thrummed with his boneshaking absolutely-not-a-purr. "Oh, love, love, going to be the second death of me, but I'll go a happy man..."

Buffy ran her fingers along the curve of his skull, ruffling the short plushy hair at the nape of his neck. Considering the Jello-y condition of her skeletal system, when would it be safe to leave off leaning against the wall and stand on her own? A week or so, yeah, that should do it...except--Attack of the Mundane Annoyances--she really needed to put in another tampon _now_ or she'd be all icky again soon. Not that Spike would mind, but... "We can't keep doing this."

His hands slid along the arches of her hips, up under the rumpled folds of her skirt and down again to clasp the curve of her ass with an approving rumble. The little leaps and twitches of the muscles beneath the ivory-satin skin as his fingers moved were mesmerizing. "Doing what?"

"Having sex to make ourselves feel better every time we have an argument."

Spike looked up, tongue-tip protruding wickedly from a sharp-toothed grin. He cocked an eyebrow. "Why not? Works, dunnit? I feel better."

"Yeah, but...doesn't it bother you even the slightest bit that for us a shoving match counts as foreplay?"

His shoulders quivered with laughter. "Perfectly normal for _me,_ pet." Spike's voice had dropped to a ragged whisper, but as usual, he still had something to say. Unlike this afternoon, when he'd stood gaping like a goldfish on the stairs, unable even to come up with one of his implausible lies...

Something went _click_ in the Deductive Reasoning Department of Buffy-Brain Central. _Since when is Spike _ever_ speechless? Something funny's going-- _

"Whossat buzzing?" Spike mumbled, lips nuzzling the damp curls at her crotch. "Didn't bring a few toys with you, did you, Slayer?"

Buffy groped blindly for her purse, which had somehow wrenched itself around to dangle behind her. "Phone," she said intelligently. She disentangled herself with a groan and Spike, with vast reluctance, pulled away. He stood and tucked himself back into his jeans, stepping back far enough to allow her to move, while keeping the voluminous sweep of his duster interposed between her and the rest of the world--one of those bizarrely gentlemanly gestures he was prone to now and then. Buffy tugged her skirt (its pristine interview-quality innocence compromised hopelessly for all time) back down over her hips and fumbled with the cell for a moment. She jabbed the 'talk' button, and said in her best 'I have _not_ just had one of the top ten orgasms of my life, thank you for asking!' voice, "Hello?"

Anya's sharp voice crackled over the staticky connection. "Buffy? We're on Lincoln and Devonshire, and we just spotted Tanner heading south, back towards the dump. There are four or five men with him. I'd be careful. They're carrying Wal-mart shopping bags."

Buffy's spine went cold, and Good Buffy stuck out her tongue at Bad Buffy and booted her out of the captain's chair. "Erk. On it." She thumbed the phone off, stuffed it back into her purse and pulled out her compact and the hygienic necessaries to effect quick repairs. "We'd better make them ditch the goods before Willow sees them, or they'll be little piles of ash." Spike's other eyebrow did the honors this time. "Lock her in an abandoned factory, no problem, but do _not_ tell Willow you shop at Wal-Mart."

Spike snorted. "Glad to see her social conscience is alive and well, even if the other sort's on holiday--though I say it as shouldn't."

Buffy decided she didn't have time to ask for an explanation of what he meant by that. She tilted her compact to catch the light of the streetlamp and examined her reflection for lipstick smudges; Spike lounged back against the nearest telephone pole, watching her with a smug grin. Damn men, all they had to do to hide the evidence was zip up. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the broken window. "That's coming out of your allowance."

"Ah? I'm a kept man now, am I?"

"No, you're a rising entrepreneur. Anya says so."

Spike blinked, stunned. He rubbed the back of his neck and gave her a puzzled look. "Knew I was good, love, but I didn't think I was that good."

Buffy paid great attention to de-wrinkling her skirt and maintained a straight face with some effort. _Note to self: Sudden unexpected capitulation excellent move for putting smarmy vampires off-balance. _ "Giles pointed out that it could be a useful cover. Besides, anything to keep you from hanging around on street corners and propositioning loose women."

Spike sucked on his teeth for a moment, looking as if he were considering further comment and wisely deciding against it. There: blouse buttoned, hair straightened, lipstick touched up--ready to kick ass. "That's half a mile from here; we should be able to catch up to them and turn them around. They're used to dodging vamps, so if you flash the lumpies and give them a grrr or two maybe we can keep them on the run without having to fight them."

Spike's eyes gleamed gold for a second. "Fun and games, pet, but they know me by sight. Not likely to run from the bloke who..." He broke off and continued a little awkwardly, "...they think can't bite 'em."

That was a small problem. "Can't recognize you if they never get a good look. It's dark. Try to look mysterious."

Buffy set off at an easy lope, and Spike followed, matching his longer stride to hers. The night air rushed past her, cold and invigorating. Such a relief--no, such a _joy_\--she never had to worry about leaving him behind.

_Slayers don't do joy_. The peevish voice of Good Buffy, prim in a skirt that wasn't slit up to anywhere, hair no doubt pulled back in a headache-inducing bun. Countered by the _Says who?_ of Bad Buffy, snapping her gum. _You don't even know what a Slayer is anymore--not really. _

Maybe she didn't. Giles's revelation, incomplete as it was, explained so much, and at the same time it explained nothing at all. She'd assumed that her willingness to accept Spike into her bed and her life meant that there was something wrong with her, some dark glorious flaw that accounted for her attraction to vampires and her world-saving malaise and Ghede's assertion that she was responsible for the teetering of the Balance. If Slayers were part evil demon, and the Balance was out of whack because of her, then obviously she'd come back from the dead messed up, the dark Slayer-y killer instinct inside magnified somehow--by the resurrection spell, by hanging out with Spike too much--who knew, who cared? There it was, and the Summers' mantra for the new millennium was _deal with it_.

But when she put all that together with Xander and Spike's encounter with the Harrier, it didn't add up. The Harrier had been a good demon, and if the Balance was out of whack on the side of good, but it was still her fault, then what did that mean? That she'd come back as Saint Buffy? Ha so very ha. She didn't know many saints whose idea of a fun night out was screwing the undead on a street corner. If she felt herself any kind of a better person these days, it was due to the glow of physical well-being. _Buffy Summers's recipe for enlightenment: Eat, sleep, have lots of sex, and be nicer to people. Ooh, yeah, that's going to cut into ticket sales on the Dalai Lama's next lecture tour._

Besides, some stubborn part of her didn't _want_ an explanation for the connection she felt to Spike. The effervescent warmth those cold hands could rouse in her was its own justification. She was tired of destiny, sick of things she was born to do. Spike had, from the first, been a wild card, and damn it, she wanted him to remain so. Someone in her world had to live unburdened by prophecies.

She might not know what a Slayer was, but she knew what one could do. Buffy shoved thought aside and ran.

Together they sped across a steeplechase of yards and parking lots, taking hedges and parking dividers in stride (there truly were practical reasons for wearing skirts slit up to there). A six-foot fence loomed up out of the darkness in front of them, encircling the back lot of a Circle K. Beyond it she could hear the desultory hum of traffic on Lincoln. A look at Spike, and both of them sprang up, grabbing the top rail of the fence and vaulting with effortless athletic grace into the parking lot beyond.

Spike landed in a billow of leather and shot upright, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. His night-sighted eyes roved around the lot, searching the inky shadows. There was nothing there but piles of milk crates stacked up against the chain-link, but he was clearly spoiling for a fight, all hopped up on Slayer's blood and testosterone. He wouldn't get one against human foes, but maybe they'd get lucky and run into a few more vamps. Buffy left the close-up reconnaissance to his keener senses and concentrated on communications. She flipped her hair out of her eyes, pulled out her cell again and punched Anya up on the speed dial. "We're behind the Circle K. How far have they gotten?"

Anya's voice faded, then strengthened again. "Not far. They're carrying an excess of consumer goods, so they can't move very fast. They're crossing Alameda now."

She didn't have to relay the information to Spike; his vampiric hearing easily picked up Anya's half of the conversation, and he was already in motion, duster swirling behind him. Buffy caught up in a few paces and they ran in silence for a moment. "Split up at Devonshire?" Spike asked.

Buffy nodded, envying his ability to use all his breath for talking. At the next corner she kept to the main thoroughfare and Spike sheared off, disappearing into the alley. She took a quick look for traffic and cut across Lincoln kitty-corner. It would be easier to sneak up on Tanner &amp; Co. if she didn't trample right past them on her way to cutting them off at the pass. There was a metallic clang behind her as Spike found a rain pipe, and when she looked back for a second she saw him silhouetted between the air-conditioning vents on the roof of the dry-cleaning shop. Then he was gone--from her sight, anyway. The pins-and-needles tingle between her shoulderblades told her exactly how close he was, always.

*****

Tanner trudged along the sidewalk, the others trailing behind him like a line of demented ducklings following their mother. A lithe figure darted across his peripheral vision, disappearing behind the blocky blue shape of a mailbox. One of Rack's cast-offs? When he turned there was nothing. Tanner increased his pace and began sorting through the scraps and tag-ends of spells that littered the bottom of his mind, and his fingers closed around the talismans in his pocket. The yellow rubber dog gave a muted squeak in his grasp.

Again the flash of movement almost too quick for his eyes to catch, and a nerve-rasping growl from the shadows. Sweat began to bead on his forehead despite the chill. They were being stalked. Driven. Tanner's head retracted turtle-like between his shoulders. "Follow me," he said, and cut across the street, hurrying from one pool of streetlight to another. The others followed, giving vent to uneasy moans and whimpers. Panic showed in Ramon's white-ringed eyes and he clutched his bag of Band-Aids and rubbing alcohol to his chest. He recognized that sound, the sound most residents of Sunnydale heard only once before their deaths. Vampires had almost gotten Ramon last week, but the Slayer had interfered. They couldn't bank on that kind of luck tonight. The one spell he could count on casting reliably was useless against the undead, and the last impromptu spell he'd tried had had spectacularly bad results. Somewhere in the dregs of his memory there was some charm or cantrip...

White light flooded from windows a block off the main street, illuminating half the corner, a fluorescent beacon in the night. _Sacred Heart Fellowship Church, Rummage Sale Weds._ Salvation. "This way!" Tanner snapped. There was nothing about sacred ground that would harm a vampire; only the cross itself, a symbol of life long predating the religion which had claimed it, would do that. But most vampires didn't know that--creatures of the night had their own fears and superstitions. Tanner dropped back and took Carmel's arm, urging him onwards. If they could all get inside...

A spark flared in the shadows beside the front door, illuminating the sharp, inhuman planes and angles of the creature's face for a heartbeat. They'd reached sanctuary too late. The slim dark figure separated itself from the wall and started towards them at a leisurely walk. The baleful vermillion eye of his lit cigarette bobbed, an evil will-o-wisp. "Run!" Tanner yelled. "Split up!" He turned and broke into a clumsy weaving trot, searching for something, anything, he could fashion into a cross. Two sticks, a lug wrench, anything at all--

Another figure, smaller but moving with equally deadly grace, materialized from behind an oleander hedge, cutting off Carmel as he stumbled for the alley. It was too late to catch all of them; Ramon hurled his bags at the shadowy figure and it flung up its arms to defend against the rain of Crest and cotton swabs and beef jerky strips. Tanner whimpered and changed course again. He had no idea if there were more than two, though it hardly mattered--the things were terrifyingly fast, circling their prey like sheepdogs with an unruly flock. In every direction he turned, yellow eyes and mocking fang-filled smiles blocked his path. In every direction but one.

Tanner ran, and Carmel and Matches and Jim ran with him. Ramon was nowhere in sight; maybe he'd gotten away. Over the pounding of his own heart he could hear metallic laughter from the scatter of cars in the parking lot, their grilles stretched into gleaming, chrome-toothed grins at his panic. And behind him, never slowing, never speeding, the sound of pursuing feet.

*****

Somehow the walk back to the Magic Box seemed a lot longer than the walk out had been. Dawn had to stop herself several times from uneasy backwards glances, and remind herself that it didn't matter if the things in the night were going bump, because none of them would give her a second look. Any more than Spike and Buffy had. _I need to wash my brain out with soap now._ Overall, this had been a really dumb idea. She'd wanted to recapture the feeling she'd had last week in the park, when despite the nerves and the fear and the running away, she'd had the sense that she was doing something that mattered--that she was really truly helping.

And that, she told herself with disgust, is because then you were helping, not just sneaking along to spy on your sister's makeout sessions. She aimed a dispirited kick at a fallen palm frond. Why'd she let Willow talk her into this? It was such a little-kid thing to do, almost as dorky as daring Harmony to come inside the house. No wonder Buffy didn't want her patrolling. Well, this was the last time. Tomorrow there'd be a new Dawn Summers. Mature, responsible, fully-qualified-for-world-saveage Dawn Summers.

She was passing the last (or the first) of the apartment complexes on Laramie, only a couple of blocks from Main, when she heard the sound of racing feet behind her. She jumped off the sidewalk--caution, right, because she had no need to get scared as long as she had the clipboard in hand, but what if whoever it was ran her over? The man came tearing into sight a second later, legs pumping, arms flailing, running as if the devil were after him--in Sunnydale, a distinct possibility. Dawn debated stepping further back into the bushes...just in case. The guy was only a few hundred feet away and getting closer every minute--medium height, dark hair, a little heavy-set, Dodgers T-shirt...

_Ramon._ Dawn backed up, caught the heel of her sneaker on a sprinkler head, and fell flat on her butt. "Ooof!" The breath went out of her, but she managed to keep hold of the magic clipboard. She got one hand under her and crab-walked backwards a few feet before scrambling to her feet. He wouldn't notice. He couldn't notice.

Ramon's headlong careen came to a staggering halt two houses away. Dawn took another couple of steps back, bumping up against a thevetia bush. He kept coming, a few uncertain steps at a time, and oh, no, no, he was starting to angle across the laws straight towards her. He lifted both hands over his head, waving them to the sound of cheers or wails only he could hear, and cried out, "!la muchacha verde del sol, brillando intensamente y hermosa, me da por favor ligero!"

Was the spell not working any longer? The man moaned, reaching out to her, and in the fugitive light of passing headlights his face was twisted with fear and longing, all for her. "!Venido dime ligero!" he cried, fingers crooked in supplication. His need, his pain, were overwhelming--worse, somehow, than any physical threat. Blind terror overtook her, and Dawn ripped her eyes away from that tormented face and sprinted off across the darkened lawn for the bright lights of Main Street.

*****

The censer was set up on the loading dock of the store across the alley from the Magic Box, and the dusty, open-sky scent of burning sage perfumed the cold air. Translucent coils of smoke wreathed her as Willow prepared for the rituals to come. Willow inscribed the last stroke of _Malkuth_ on the rough concrete, and sat back on her heels to inspect her work. In lieu of the usual ritual circle, she'd decided to call on a tradition a little closer to home--she was hardly an observant Jew these days, but there was power in these symbols that resonated in her bones. She'd need all the help she could get tonight. The Tree Of Life covered most of the free space in the alley: three triangles in blue and red chalk, balanced one upon the other, with Hebrew letters in yellow and black at the nodes. Malkuth was inscribed below the bottom-most triangle.

"That's just amazing," Tara said, squatting down to trace one of the symbols with a fingertip--not touching the chalked lines, but the air above them. "No material components at all. It's like you just reach down under the skin and find the bones that magic has in common..."

Willow flushed with pleasure. "Oh, well, it's all modular. Just call me Henry Ford. A Jewish lesbian witch Henry Ford, but hey." She got to her feet and looked around. No sign of Dawn. Maybe she could pull this spell off with the power her invisible friend had lent her, but one of the conditions of her getting to keep that power was that she draw on Dawn's energies to cast it, and this spell had been crafted specifically to do just that. If Dawn was following Buffy still, she'd return eventually--but what if Buffy and Spike had managed to ditch her? Willow knew from experience how hard it was to keep up with Buffy if she took off at full speed, and Spike wouldn't hold her up any. Dawn could be anywhere. Maybe a summoning spell--

Tara's hand fell on her shoulder and Willow all but leaped out of her skin. "Hon, I know you're nervous, but you've set this up really well. If it doesn't work, you tried your best."

Forcing herself to relax, Willow laid her head on Tara's shoulder and slipped an arm around her waist. Tara, warm and soft and smelling of lilacs. "You always know just what to say. It's just the hurry up and wait."

The door to the shop opened and Giles walked out into the alley. He glanced up at the strip of city-pale night sky visible overhead. "Tara's correct, Willow. You've done exceptionally well."

Praise from Giles was always extra-special. Willow gave him a grateful smile, and couldn't help but notice the weary droop to his shoulders and the dark circles under his eyes. A pang of guilt pricked her; she knew better than any of them just how exhausting research could be, and Giles had been knocking himself out for them lately, at the expense of his own affairs. "Are you sure you're up to this? You look wasted."

Giles sat down on the loading dock with a rueful snort. "Nothing a week's retreat in the Cotswolds wouldn't cure." He looked down at the network of lines. "We're short two people, I assume you know?"

Willow grimaced. _No, only one._ "I know. I'm hoping we can use Tanner. He is a wizard, he's kinda sane most of the time, and I think he wants to help the rest of them. I've got something else in mind for Kether." _Don't ask what, OK?_ "Tara's spell will short-circuit his magic, but he'll still have the knowledge of how to work it."

"If it works." Tara fingered the length of silver chain essential to her own part in the ceremony, letting it pour from one hand to the other. "And if we can convince him to cooperate. I don't like this. My mother showed me some things before she died, how to hex a rival--she didn't want me to be doing it, but she said I should know the signs and how to protect myself." She jounced the medallion in her palm, making the links jingle. "I know this isn't the same thing, but..."

"Hey, don't you get all self-doubty on me," Willow said, chucking Tara's chin. "Sometimes you have to break omelettes to cast spells." She pulled away from her lover's side and paced down the length of the alley, careful to avoid stepping on anything important. She had here what amounted to a giant magical hopscotch grid, and she was woefully short on stones. "The crazies'll go in the middle, on Tiphereth. I want you two on Bineh and Chokmah, and I'm going to put Spike and Anya on Geburah and Chesed--"

Giles straightened and took notice. "Anya? On Chesed? That's an... unusual choice."

"Tell me about it." Willow stuck out her tongue. "But I figured she's an ex-vengeance demon, maybe she'll have the whole opposites thing going for her. Besides, options? Limited. So Mercy it is. Then Xander and I get Netzach and Hod, and knock wood Tanner gets Yesod, and Buffy gets Malkuth--because of having been dead and all? I coulda put Spike there, I guess, but I think he's better at Geburah, and then you get the whole demon thing going with him and Anya in the second triad. Or maybe I should take Yesod... it's associated with witchcraft and all, right? But Tanner on Intellect? Really not of the good right now. You know what? I should have cast a location spell on Buffy so we could tell how far away she is. Either that, or we need to get a cell phone too."

Giles held up a hand for quiet. "I don't believe that's necessary quite yet."

"Are they gone?" asked voice from the street. A man's voice, pitched low and harsh with strain. Both witches froze, recognizing it as the voice of the man in the cemetery--Daniel Tanner. Willow and Tara exchanged looks, and faded back behind the stack of half-broken-down cardboard boxes beside the delivery entrance.

A figure slunk around the corner and halted in the mouth of the alley, pressed up against the wall. The chaser lights from the window of the café across the street limned him in a garish series of flashes in red, green and gold. Shabby clothes, less well-cared-for than Willow remembered, face more deeply lined--but unmistakably Daniel Tanner. Willow hunched her shoulders against the crawling sensation working its way up her spine, and fought back the urge to run. _** He can't hurt you now,**_ said the black voice within her. **_ Soon nothing will be able to hurt you_**.

"There, there, there, over the hill and far away," another voice--also male, also cracking with anxiety--broke in, shuffling up behind Tanner and clutching his sleeve. Heartbeats later two more men appeared, huddling together like children, and Willow's fear dissolved in a rush of pity. She'd been there, after all, if only for a few short hours, chasing through the labyrinth of her own mind for words that dissolved in her grasp, searching in vain for an escape from the crawling rot that was herself. She'd felt what these wrecks of humanity felt, known what they knew. And now she was going to fix it.

*****

It was just on nine; most of the shops were closing or already closed, lights going out in one glowing commercial shrine after another, but people still straggled along Main, heading for their cars, or the late movie at the Sun, or to one of Sunnydale's scattering of downtown restaurants. Spike loomed over the eaves of Gotta Book, motionless, breathless, still as stone, watching the swirls and eddies of humanity on the darkening sidewalks. Red, green, blue flashed in the unblinking gold of his eyes, limned each in their turn the savage ridges of his brow. The night was alive in his nose and on his tongue--exhaust fumes and dust, the piney smell of resin from the Christmas tree lot a block away, Columbian roast from the Espresso Pump and hot grease from the competing grills of McDonald's, the In-and-Out Burger, and the Doublemeat Palace.

And permeating all, the heady scent of living human sweat and blood, insufficiently masked beneath perfume and deodorant. Spike probed the points of his fangs with the tip of his tongue and shook the thought out of his head. Work to do. The crowds weren't as thick as they had been earlier--it was a Monday night, after all, and keeping track of the four men making their way down Main was child's play. He'd have taken after the fifth if Buffy hadn't bid him let the tosser go.

Thirty feet behind them, Buffy looked up, her gaze going unerringly to his perch, and gestured, pointing out the man in the windbreaker--Jim, if Spike remembered right from the night in the park. Spike studied him, observing the direction of his nervous glances and the jerking of his limbs with a century and a quarter of predator's cunning. Oh, yeah, planning a break, all right--that way. Spike noted the speed and trajectory of his prey, the other pedestrians, and the approaching Impala said prey obviously intended to use as a cover, shifted his weight forward, and dropped over the edge of the roof into the darkness.

When you were eight, and you didn't realize there was anything different about girls except the petticoats, you tried to impress her by standing on your head, which experiment generally resulted in a cracked skull and ignominious tears. When you were sixteen, and you knew there was all the difference in the world, you blushed and stammered, and she turned up her nose at your offer to escort her home when there were handsomer boys from wealthier families she could walk with. When you were twenty-eight, and you prided yourself on your sensitivity, you wrote her dreadful poetry, and got yourself killed when she rejected both it and you.

And when you were a hundred and forty-nine and possessed of reflexes a cat would kill for and a body of whipcord and steel which could finally stand up to your own grandiose expectations of it, and you were so in love it was like to un-kill you, you more or less reverted to eight. _Look at me, Buffy, look, look, look! Only one hand!_

Spike landed on all fours in front of the bookstore, uncoiled into a running leap and landed on the Impala's hood as the sedan whooshed under him, kicked off and launched himself into the air before the startled driver had time to react. He hit the opposite sidewalk in a perfect shoulder-roll and sprang to his feet in the middle of the side street. A flash of fangs and a snarl and good ol' Jim blanched and skittered back to the others.

Buffy nailed him with a killer eye-roll at fifty yards, and he broke into a mad grin--not the most reassuring expression in game face, apparently, since the crazies broke into an immediate trot.

They were headed in the right direction, so Spike leaned back against the corner of the store and waited for Buffy. She jogged up within seconds, tawny hair in fetching disarray around pink cheeks and bright eyes. Tara's glamor was starting to fade. "We're almost there," she said, all business. "Get ahead of them again, cut them off, and we'll force them into the alley."

"Right, love." She learned quickly, his lioness.

"Oh, and Nemov? The Olympics were last year."

God, he loved that tone, the bossy one with the smile underneath. Spike tossed her a smirk and a salute and sprinted off.

They hadn't seen him yet. Of course not. He didn't want to be seen. Slipping from parked car to mailbox to doorway while the little group stopped at the mouth of the alley behind the Magic Box and engaged in a whispered debate about what to do next. Ten feet behind them he put on a burst of vampiric speed--from his perspective, the humans' movements slowed to a crawl while he tore past them and came to a stop across the street from the alley. From their perspective, had they been watching, he would have simply disappeared and re-appeared elsewhere, still grinning.

He could see down half the length of the alley from this vantage point, and recognize elements of the demon's cats-cradle Will had scrawled across the oil-spotted pavement. As he watched, Tara stepped out from behind the heap of half-crushed boxes, wheat-colored hair swinging loose about her shoulders. Soft and quiet and unassuming, Tara, yet with an unconscious dignity that caught the eye. She stretched out both hands in front of her, palms upturned. "Mr. Tanner?" she asked, every movement, every shading of her voice calculated to soothe--no magic, just Tara. In spite of that, the little gang of men clustered in the mouth of the alley cried out at the sight of her. The acrid scent of fear lent piquancy to the pervading odor of unwashed humanity.

He sensed Buffy's approach before he saw her, a lithe shape skulking along behind a row of parked cars across the street. She gave him a thumbs up, and he rose from the shadows and started across the street at a deliberate walk. Buffy slipped between two of the parked cars and together they converged on the alleyway, leaving their quarry no option but to back into the trap. Tara held up a hand as they got closer; Buffy halted some fifteen feet from the alley and Spike followed her lead. "Mr. Tanner?" Tara repeated, all sincerity and calm. "I'm here to help you, if you'll let me. We're here to help all of you."

Spike held his breath, distantly amused at himself for doing so. For a second it looked as if her plea would work, but whether it was a synapse misfiring in Tanner's frazzled brain, or the perfectly logical fear that Tara was a vampire too, panic flared in his faded brown eyes. His lanky frame tensed and his gaze went to Buffy. "Slayer?" he whispered, panic turning to confusion. "I thought--" He turned and saw the vampire's face clearly for the first time, and the confusion dispersed, replaced by grim resolve. "It's him! He's harmless! Come on!" Spike stood his ground as Tanner charged straight at him with a wild yell. The others followed, albeit with less enthusiasm, a pack of waving fists and insane determination.

As Buffy lunged after the crazy in the blue baseball cap, Spike got a vague impression of a young girl with long brown hair who came running down the street out of nowhere. The girl swung wide, collided with the crazy, and Buffy's swing met empty air as the man's feet flew out from under him and he dropped to the ground with a surprised grunt. Buffy swore and dove after the nameless man on the ground. The girl fell in the opposite direction, picked herself up and dashed into the alley, wide-eyed and panting. Spike immediately forgot about her and braced himself for the onslaught--stood his ground, thumbs tucked into his belt, watching his oncoming foes with an evil little grin which would have worried any sane attacker. Tanner and the other two flung themselves at him.

Spike sidestepped Windbreaker Jim--the old coot had to be sixty if he were a day; no threat there. Tanner's desperate strained face was three feet from his own, Tanner's bony fist was flying towards his jaw. Spike raised his right hand (lazily, from his perspective, lightning-quick, from Tanner's) and caught the onrushing fist in a bone-crushing grip, absorbing the momentum of the blow with barely a grunt of effort. Tanner paled with shock and Spike's left fist shot out in a carefully pulled punch.

He lived through a dozen eternities as his fist arced towards its target, because rats were one thing, but human beings (_Your natural prey_ , Angelus's voice pointed out) were something else again, and who knew what would happen when his knuckles connected solidly with the other man's jaw...

Crack of bone on bone, a wail of pain (hallefuckinlujah, not his!) and Daniel Tanner flew fifteen or twenty feet back and slammed into the alley wall, instantly unconscious--forgotten how sodding fragile the average human being was when you could really let go and hit them. Spike stood staring with incredulous joy at his clenched fist, which twinged just the slightest bit across the knuckles (already healing) and which was the only thing about him that did. He threw back his head and roared for sheer bloody-minded joy, whirling on his next victim, who came staggering into him reeling from Buffy's blow. Spike grabbed Blue Cap by the shirtfront and hoisted him into the air, shaking him as a terrier would a rat. He rammed his nose into the man's fear-convulsed face and bared his fangs, and the bastard all but pissed himself then and there. "Yeah! That's right! Quiver in your bleeding boots, chum, 'cause Spike's back and he's a bloody--!"

The boast died in his throat as fingers gripped his arm, digging into his biceps hard enough to hurt. He looked down. Eyes confronted him, boring into his own--those gorgeous Sarah Crewe eyes, grey-green, flecked with golden brown, rimmed with impossibly thick dark lashes. Enormous. Horrified. Buffy stood beside him on the pavement, her lower lip just this side of trembling, her hand on his arm rock-steady, pulling Blue Cap back to earth. Her other hand hovered an inch away from her purse, where among other useful items, she always carried, as Spike knew very well, the well-worn length of oak which had served two Slayers in its time--just the thing for a vampire who'd killed two.

The look of betrayal in her eyes was worse than any stake.

He lost his hold on game face without even realizing it, tossed Blue Cap after Tanner, and dropped to his knees before her for the second time that night. "Oh, Christ, Buffy--my heart, my love, I tried to tell you, I really did!" His voice had gone husky and pleading. If she believed nothing else of him ever again, she had to believe this. "I know--I know I'm a monster. But I'll do my damnedest to be a good monster--for you, love." He spread his arms wide, baring his chest to that length of sharpened oak which had been polished on the bones of a thousand of his kind before him.

He closed his eyes--because it was traditional. And he waited.


	28. Chapter 28

Dawn threw out one arm as she raced up to the corner. _Whang!_ the aluminum pole of the street sign slapped into her palm, and muscle-shock tore up her arm to her shoulder as her weight swung over, out, around--she was Sheena of the Jungle, legs scissoring over the curb as she used the sign to slingshot around the corner. She took off down Main the moment she touched ground again, her feet pounding down the narrow stretch of sidewalk, breath ripping in and out of her lungs. Anyone chased by monsters on a regular basis really should go out for track. That stupid story from second period English kept running through her head, the one about the magic of getting new sneakers. She could use some magic sneakers about now. When had Main Street gotten so long? It was only a block or two from the corner of Main and Laramie to the Magic Box, but it was a block or two that stretched for miles...there!

The mouth of the alley was choked with people--Spike, Buffy, Tanner, three more crazies. Her sister's small lithe body blocked the sidewalk on one side, and Spike loomed opposite, boxing the crazies in. In two more of Dawn's flying steps the tableau broke apart, the crazies charging Spike, Buffy lunging for the one in the blue cap. Dawn saw an opening in the melee and swerved for it just as Blue Cap flinched away from Buffy. His head came up, and his rheumy eyes widened with childlike delight as they met Dawn's. He lurched forward, reaching out to embrace her with a gap-toothed grin. Dawn made a futile effort to un-swerve--Spike and Buffy performed impossible maneuvers all the time, surely she could straighten out one turn--but momentum was not her friend. She felt herself losing control, one body part at a time: feet skidding out from beneath her, arms flailing, center of balance shifting disastrously to the left.

She slammed into Blue Cap full-force, bowling him over and falling backwards onto her butt. He hit the pavement with a pained grunt, a flailing tangle of limbs and Salvation Army-reject clothing. Still reaching for her, even now--gnarled fingers with black half-moons of nails pawed her ankles. Dawn kicked free and was on her feet again with a clumsy roll-and-scramble, clipboard clutched to her chest. Buffy sidestepped her to get at Blue Cap, but otherwise neither she nor Spike gave her a second glance. Time to dump this thing. She made to skim the clipboard away frisbee-style, but a voice shouting "Dawn! Over here!" interrupted her.

Half-way down the alley, Willow leaned out from behind a pile of boxes on the loading dock, hopping up and down and waving an arm. The auburn flag of her hair burned against the backdrop of alley-grunge. Dawn dove for cover behind the dock and Willow yanked a stove-sized box emblazoned SCRYING BASINS, 1 DOZ. THIS SIDE UP in front of the both of them. She burrowed into the corrugated cavern, utterly unfounded relief flooding her as the scent of glue and cardboard evoked childhood secret hideouts, where the monsters couldn't come. She tossed the clipboard aside, drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them, trying to catch her breath.

Willow nudged her knee with the corner of the clipboard. "Keep it," she whispered. "Just in case."

"It doesn't work on them!" Dawn whispered back, making frantic beating motions in the direction of the crazies.

Willow sat back on her heels and gnawed on her lower lip. "Shoot. I never thought of that. They can see your Keyness. Stay here. We should have them under control in a minute." She started backing out, then paused, her eyes shifting from emerald to onyx. "I really need you to keep hold of that clipboard, Dawnie."

She was off, and Dawn sat there in a long-legged heap for a minute or so, trying to decide if she should just stay where she was or sneak out and try to get inside the Magic Box. Either option involved scouting, so she grabbed the clipboard again (because, really important) and crawled forward on hands and knees, peering around the edge of the loading dock.

Willow was crouching beside Tara, who was kneeling beside Tanner's crumpled body. Dawn suppressed a shudder; Tanner's breathing sounded like the drugged-up wheeze of a patient she'd had to pass on the way to visit Mom in the hospital last year. One day the bed had held a sheet-swathed lump surrounded by machines that went ping, and the next it'd been empty.

The crazy in the blue cap was sprawled on the sidewalk, and Giles had the older one in the yellow windbreaker backed whimpering against the alley wall opposite Tanner. Xander's car was just pulling up to the opposite curb, and Xander and Anya piled out and raced across to grab the third crazy, a non-descript, balding man with no convenient identifying clothing, before he could take advantage of Buffy's distraction and escape.

And Buffy was big-time distracted, but why? Dawn felt like the clue bus was coming and she'd lost her transfer. Spike knelt on the sidewalk in front of her sister, his head thrown back and throat bared like some out-take from Animal Planet, the vampire propitiating his mate. Buffy stared down at him with big frozen eyes, and Dawn didn't think she was just stupefied by the sight of that dorky striped sweater he was wearing.

Xander, still wrestling with his crazy, cleared his throat loudly and nodded at Blue Cap, who was beginning to stir. "You know, if you and the undead Marcel Marceau here can spare an invisible room to put these guys in, or even just lend us a hand--"

Buffy came to life and hushed him with a gesture. She dropped to one knee to bring herself level with Spike, the glint in her eye indicating that she was having a National Geographic moment of her own. Her hand fumbled at the clasp of her purse. Her gaze never left Spike's face as she pulled out--ohmigod, a stake, Mr. Pointy no less, you could tell because it was slimmer and sharper than the ones Xander turned out on the lathe, and sort of twisty, because for all her virtues Kendra hadn't been any great shakes at whittling, and was she going to she _ wasn't_ going to--she _was_ going to!

"Buffy!" Dawn screamed. But no one noticed.

*****

There were eleven heartbeats thumping away within hearing distance, and he could match each one to a name each one without even thinking about it. Jim, Blue Cap, and the Third Murderer (well, he had to call the bloke something), erratic with terror. Tanner's, slow and labored. Xander's, racing with the exuberance of youth; Giles's strong and steady but with less resilience than his younger companions'. Willow's, a wild triphammer of anticipation; Tara's, sweet and smooth; Anya's bird-quick and fierce. (And someone else? Younger, been running hard?)

The only one that mattered was Buffy's, three feet in front of him. You'd think hers would be another bird-flutter in that tiny chest, but no--the Slayer's pulse was as deep and powerful as that of the earth itself, strong enough to shake him to the bone. His sensitive ears caught the rustle of clothing as she dropped to one knee, and his whole body quivered as something hard and sharp jabbed him in the abdomen. The wooden point didn't penetrate the skin. "That's not my heart, love."

"Shut up." Her voice was brittle with tension. The stake-point slipped under the waistband of his jeans and tugged the hem of his pullover free. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tried," he gasped. "Couldn't." The muscles of his stomach twitched as the sharp point snaked its way upwards, pulling his shirt with it and drawing cool night air across his exposed skin in its wake.

"How long has it been?" Buffy whispered.

Spike swallowed, one convulsive bob of his Adam's apple, and heard her breath hitch. Never could see the sense in her fixation with _his_ throat. "I can't tell you that."

"Did you get it taken out?" She leaned towards him, straddling his thighs. Her scent was a ravishing medley of blood and sweat, anger and arousal. Her pert little breasts brushed his bare chest through her thin rayon blouse. The stake-point traced its way higher, up over the vault of his ribcage, digging into his flesh slightly with every irregular panting breath he took. "Or did it just stop working?"

Hoarsely, "I can't tell you that either."

"Can't?" The deadly sliver of wood traveled up and down the line of his sternum, then wandered across to his left pectoral, drawing ever-tighter circles around the fading scar where Glory's fingers had dug through flesh and bone. His nipples went taut and he unsuccessfully tried to stifle a groan. Buffy's warm breath, smelling of orange Tic-Tacs and the second-hand traces of his cigarettes, caressed his cheek. "Or won't?" The stake-tip flicked his left nipple, then dug in a few inches above it, imprinting its mark on his skin. Right over his heart. Oh, God in Heaven, he was either going to die or come in his jeans, and either one would be a relief.

To hell with tradition; his eyes flew open to meet Buffy's. "_Can't!_ I've tried! Tried with you, tried with Dawn--the words won't come, I--"

The stake disappeared. Buffy surged upright, taking her weight off his knees, and something small, oblong, and black rushed towards his face at supersonic speeds. _Thwack!_ The purse smacked him across the nose and Spike lost his balance and toppled over backwards. "Next time," Buffy hissed, "try a little harder!"

Spike lay spreadeagled on the sidewalk, blinking up at her. _Hey, Slayer, I can see up your skirt from here_ didn't seem to be the cleverest segue to a new topic of conversation at the moment. "Not going to kill me, then?" he croaked.

Buffy grabbed Blue Cap by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet, hustling him towards the alley. "Maybe tomorrow."

_Thus speaks the Dread Pirate Buffy._ Spike sat up and got to his feet, yanking his pullover down over his middle and slapping the worst of the sidewalk grit from his duster. "You didn't ask--" The big question, the do-I-need-to-stake-you question, the question that should be first and foremost in a Slayer's mind when she finds out her demon lover has his bite back.

Buffy turned. The anger had fled, leaving her face grave and quiet. She looked up at him, moss-agate eyes searching his. "If you've killed anyone?" She'd worn that look the night she died, the night she said _Come in, Spike._ "I didn't think I needed to."

She turned away and Spike followed her, chest drum-tight with an emotion too deep and terrible to be joy. There had to be something he could kill, just so he could lay it at her feet.

*****

Willow's hands clenched as Buffy leaned forward, pressing the stake to Spike's chest. The air in the alley went heavy, glassy, an oily heat-mirage shimmer of emotion. Her own appalled gasp, Dawn's shriek of warning, were both stifled under the weight of an alien anticipation. Tara sensed it and looked up from her preparations, trying to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. Then Buffy was on her feet and Spike was flat on his back and undusty. The tension ebbed away in seconds, and Willow felt the anticipation give way to a philosophical acknowledgment that something which seemed too good to be true usually was.

_When are you going to tell me what is this all about?_ Willow demanded.

_ **You will know within the hour** _ ** .**

Willow probed further, but her only answer was quelling silence. Her bravado was starting to fray around the edges. Much more of this and she was going to dissolve into a puddle of nervous goo.

Spike caught Willow's gaze as he and Buffy herded the crazies into the alley, his own still asking _Why?_ Willow turned away, digging into a heaping helping of feeling crappy with guilt sauce. She couldn't give him whys when she didn't have any herself. She hadn't yet been able to get the vampire alone to cast the forgetfulness spell on him, and she had the awful feeling that he'd recognized the Lethe's bramble for what it was in the Magic Box. They all tended to forget that while Spike didn't normally trust magic, Drusilla'd dabbled in it. He'd helped his one-time vampire love conduct more than a few dark rituals in his day.

She couldn't even say _Trust me._ He would, she knew. He'd charge through a crowd of foes he couldn't fight, up a tower to meet an imminent sunrise and an unknown menace of indeterminate strength just because she asked him to. Because she was Buffy's friend, or because on some weird post-geek supernatural creature level, they shared an understanding? Or because Spike was, or had been becoming, her friend?

And she was betraying him.

Maybe. There wasn't anything intrinsically bad in keeping her role in the chip removal a secret, she reassured herself. There had to be a good reason for it, something to do with the crazy-curing spell, maybe. Maybe everything really was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and she wasn't just playing Pangloss to her vampire Candide. She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in, gathering calm to the center of her being and tacking it down with a stapler.

When she opened them again, Tara was draping the silver chain over Tanner's head. Her love centered the medallion of twisted silver wire and amethyst on the unconscious man's chest. Sitting back, she drew her athame from the pocket of her sweater and pulled the sheath from the short triangular blade, whispering a few words of sanctification. She held it up and pricked her forefinger, letting a single drop of blood fall on the central crystal (probably, Willow thought, the darkest spell Tara'd ever ventured) and placed the funnel over it. "With silver I find you, with heart's blood I bind you," Tara whispered. "Be sealed in this covenant till I release thee, on the names of Maktiel, and Abdiel, and Alekh-Madab." She grasped Tanner's limp shoulders in both hands and cried,  


> Powers of the mind, and heart, and soul!  
> Cunning of the fingers and cunning of the tongue!  
> Be ye a spring dried, a wind stilled  
> Be ye a fire quenched and a field made barren!  
> Thus I command ye, and what I say three times is so.  
> Thus do I bind the strength of Daniel Tanner  
> Thus do I break the staff of Daniel Tanner's power  
> Thus do I drain the virtue that lies within Daniel Tanner.  
> Be it so, be it so, be it so!

Light flared from Tanner's body all around the necklace, swirling into the mouth of the funnel and out through the nozzle. Tanner's eyes shot open as his body convulsed in Tara's grasp. For a full thirty seconds his rigid body was wreathed in witchlight, and then all went dark as he sagged back against the bricks. Tara's head fell forward to rest against Tanner's, and for another few seconds both of them were totally limp. Then he stirred, and Tara drew back. His mouth worked for a moment, and he wet his lips. "What... what did you..." He lifted one hand to the necklace. Sparks flared and the scent of ozone filled the air, and he snatched his fingers away.

"I've bound your magical abilities, Mr. Tanner," Tara said. "Just for the time being. We couldn't risk you doing what you did to Willow again." She ducked her head, a little embarrassed at being the focus of everyone's attention. "We really do want to help you."

The corner of Tanner's mouth quirked, halfway between bitter and humorous. "And you couldn't just toss me some spare change, or a temperance pamphlet?" He squinted up at Willow, as if she were out of focus. "Rotten. The heartwood's rotten... you silly girl, I had nothing to lose. It'll betray you. That's its nature." The dark mad eyes flicked to Spike. "Ask him. He knows. He's part of it at the root, the roots go deeper, deeper, digging into your brain and all the little moles... mole-runs in your head..."

"Is this the pointless, insane rambling, or the creepy, prophetic rambling?" Xander asked. Spike shrugged, looking baffled.

"Never got the hang of the difference, myself."

"Either way," Willow said, "we're here to go Sigmund Freud on its tookus." She turned to Tanner. "I can fix you. And them." She waved a hand at the other three crazies. "Do you get that? I can make you all better, for good, and you won't have to live like this anymore." She dropped to a crouch beside Tara and put a hand on her shoulder. "I remember what it was like, when Glory did this to her. I remember what it was like when you did it to me. It's horrible, and I want--I _need_ to fix this. You can make it easier by helping, but one way or another I'm going to do it." _ Because Buffy is depending on me, and this time I won't screw it up._

Tanner stared at her for a long moment, and then his thin shoulders began to shake. He broke into a thin, scary chuckle that choked off in a half-sob. "Honor among thieves," he gasped at last. "Oh, God, kid, go ahead. Why the hell not? I should get my thirty pieces of silver, shouldn't I?" He braced himself against the wall and began levering himself painfully to his feet. "Spread the wealth!"

Willow let out a breath of relief. "Let's get cooking." She clapped both hands together. "'Get these three onto Tiphareth... that's the sephira in the center of the tree... right, that one there. See how everything comes together there? It'll all flow through that center point."

"This isn't all of them," Anya pointed out as Xander grabbed the crazy in the windbreaker and dragged him over to the central sephira. "There are more. Should we find them first?"

Willow forced herself to stop worrying her lower lip. At this rate she was going to own the west coast Chapstick monopoly before midnight. Anya was right; this wasn't even half the band, and she'd promised to cure all of them. Maybe she should have pushed for a raid on the dump after all; it would have been much easier to do all of them at once that way. Now she was going to have to come up with some other scheme for getting Dawn in position to cast the spell a second time. And speaking of which--

"If this works, I'll get you the others," Tanner said. He hobbled over to the edge of the tree-of-life diagram, wincing a little at each step, and looked down at it, frowning in uncertainty. "Spiderweb," he whispered. "Spinning, spinning..." He took Jim's elbow and urged him forward. Jim whimpered and balked, and Tara got up and came over to help. Together the two of them coaxed the three men into a loose huddle around the centerpoint of the tree. Jim tried to follow Tanner when he stepped away.

"Be still," Willow said, laying a finger on the man in the windbreaker; caught in coils of power, Jim froze in place and stood shaking on the sephira of rebirth. She wished she'd learned a little more Hebrew than was necessary for her bat mitzvah; her translations, she was certain, sucked the big one. She swallowed her nerves and stepped back. "OK, everyone--almost ready. When I call you, come stand on the sephira I point to. I need a minute to, uh, meditate." She backed over to the loading dock; Dawn was leaning against it, making a futile attempt to comb the wind-tangles out of her hair with her fingers while still holding fast to the clipboard.

"I'm such a feeb," Dawn snarled. "I totally suck."

"Dawnie," she whispered, "You don't suck. I need someone to stand on Kether. That one right there at the top. For balance. I was going to have Tara do it, but I think that first spell's pretty much drained her." She was only half fibbing there; Kether had been intended for Dawn all along, but Tara was slumped in place, her face the color of oatmeal. Dawn looked doubtful, and Willow gave her a companionable nudge. "Please? I really need someone in the top spot. It's necessary to the spell, and if you don't do it I'll have to, and it'll work better if I'm free to--"

Willow saw the doubt in Dawn's eyes vanish, replaced with determination to make up for her big scaredy running away-ness. "OK. I'll do it. Do I need to do anything or say any--?"

"Just step up when I call, and stand there," Willow assured her. "I'll do all the rest."

*****

Dawn fidgeted beside the delivery door, twisting a strand of hair around one hand while Willow walked back over to the chalk diagram. The others formed a ragged circle around the edge. She wished she could chuck the clipboard and really participate, but somehow she just couldn't seem to get up the nerve to drop the thing. There'd be Buffy freakage, and there'd be questions, and the squirmy possibility that her sister would realize she'd been following them when they'd gone all Roman Polanski on the street corner. At least this way she could do something useful tonight.

Willow stopped at the top of the tree, bowed her head, and said something in Hebrew. Then she straightened and held her hands high overhead. "AIN SOPH AUR, from whence all things proceed, I invoke thy blessing! Addonai Elohim! I invoke the Supernals! I call on the Crown, the First Emanation! I call upon thy virtue; thou partest the veils of nonexistence. Kether!" She made a discreet beckoning motion with one hand, and Dawn edged nervously past Giles to stand on the sephira at the pinnacle of the whole design. A tingle ran through her scalp as she stepped onto the symbol, and the hairs at the back of her neck lifted.

This wasn't the first major ritual she'd participated in. She'd helped Willow raise Buffy from the dead, and she'd been hanging out around witches for years now--Dawn knew a few things about magic. The Raising had taken hours, and involved all kinds of repetitious chants and waving of hands. She and Spike had had detailed lists of instructions telling them where to walk, where to stop, what powder to sprinkle and what words to say when they got there. The description of the loa-summoning had sounded like a lot of the same thing. But here--Willow was just waving people into place willy-nilly. It felt weird, with none of the intricate buildup of word and gesture and symbol Dawn had grown to associate with really big magic.

But this was really big. She could feel the vibrations in the long bones of her arms and legs, like when she was six and her Dad took them to LAX and they parked under the flight path of the jets. Willow was already moving on. "I call upon Wisdom, the Second Emanation! Great Father, the giver of life! Through thee is creation engendered. Chokmah! I call upon Understanding, the Third Emanation! Great Mother, the nurturer of life! In thee is creation made manifest. Bineh!"

As Giles and Willow in turn stepped into place, completing the Supernals, Dawn felt the tingling surge downwards, lapping over her shoulders. Willow's singsong chant continued: "Addonai Elohim! I invoke the days of Creation! I call on Mercy, the Fourth Emanation; in thee is the Law with ruleth the universe, and from vengeance shall you forge mercy. Chesed!" Anya took her place, and the electric-wintergreen feeling skittered down to Dawn's elbows. Was this right? Was it normal? Willow hadn't exactly told her what to expect.

"I call upon Severity, the Fifth Emanation. Thou art the destruction that cleanses, that we may create anew; from thy chaos shall we forge order. Geburah!" Spike stepped gingerly into his place, and Dawn's fingers jerked as if she'd touched a light socket. Verdant sparks dazzled her eyes for a moment. "I call upon Harmony, the Sixth Emanation! Thou art the balance of all things, thou art the rebirth of the spirit. Thou restorest what is broken to wholeness! Tiphareth!"

Many-layered strata of censer-smoke drifted past, teasing Dawn's nose with the heavy drugged scent of incense. Willow was really into it now, her eyes like jet in her pale face. "I call upon Victory, the Seventh Emanation! Thou art the power of the heart; in thee we feel, in thee we love! Netzach!" As Xander moved in, Willow herself stepped onto the next sephira. "I call upon Splendor, the Eighth Emanation! Thou art the power of the mind; in thee we think, in thee we reason! Hod!"

Dawn gasped, trying to hold herself upright; her backbone was a T1 cable carrying a million jolts of energy a second. All the lines connecting the sephiroth were glowing neon serpents in rose and gold, and she couldn't tell if it was her eyes or if they were really moving. Willow's voice was inexorable. "I call upon the Foundation, the Ninth Emanation!"

Tanner, his drawn face and blank eyes making him look deader than Spike, stepped into place, and Dawn almost fell to her knees as the jolts of energy converged _down there_. Was this the feeling that made Buffy jump Spike on a street corner? She'd felt bits and pieces of this, thrills when giggling over Teen Beat with her friends, sweet liquid fire in her first taste of cool male lips. This was bigger, this was dangerous, the kind of danger you'd do anything to taste again. Appalling, intriguing thought: _If I'm made of Buffy..._ Was something in her drawn to that kind of danger, too?

Willow kept going. "Thou art the channel whereby enlightenment passes from Heaven to Earth; thou art the sign of magic and of the sacred union. Through thee shall pass all things! Yesod!"

A vast soundless roar battered at Dawn's ears, or perhaps she was the vast soundless roar. The censer-smoke was underlit with green now, and in the eerie light--where was it coming from? Not Willow. She could see the whites of everyone's eyes, a sickly, glistening cerise. Willow's voice rose--or did it? It was no louder, but it filled the alley from gutter to the bruised-indigo vault of the sky overhead. "I call upon the Kingdom, the Tenth Emanation! Queen of the Underworld, thou rulest the Manifested Universe, That Which Is! Malkuth!" Buffy took a step forward and as her feet touched the last of the sephira, a circuit closed and power surged from Dawn's head to her toes.

"By this Key let every gate be opened!" Willow cried out, "Let the fire of heaven descend to Earth, and be these men healed thereby!"

And something within Dawn blossomed like a terrible flower. Her blood had razed the walls between worlds before, but then she'd felt nothing but the pain of the knife-cuts in her side. Now she was light. She was sound. She was nothing and everything. Worlds without end, an infinity of infinities, tesseracts of possibility nested one within the other--all the worlds that ever were or ever could be, and she was the reality beneath the reality from which they sprung. Power beyond measure, beyond imagining, was hers--not to command, for no Key could turn itself--but to channel.

Torrents of emerald light lashed outward, the raw unformed stuff of creation, crackling through the net Willow'd woven to trap them. The rays shot down from Kether through Chokmah and Bineh, seared through Chesed and Geburah to collide in Tiphareth and lance out again through Netzach and Hod, converge in Yesod and finally in Malkuth, and from Malkuth shoot back to Yesod once more. The Tree lit up like an insane pinball machine, energy racing from point to point and back again, growing in power and intensity with every new circuit.

In the past Dawn had wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if the monks had made her a toothpick or a Porsche or a grain of sand in the Gobi desert instead of a human girl. Would Glory ever have found her? Would the ritual for using her still have required blood, or would it have magically revised itself to suit whatever form she was assigned? She'd never know the answer to those questions, but she knew this: a toothpick or a grain of sand wouldn't feel like she did now.

The human shell that was Dawn Summers screamed and clutched at her head as the forces ripped through a form never designed to contain it, scouring her mind to the bedrock. Memories flashed past, a jumble of precious lies, things that had never happened but which defined the scope of her manufactured life. She tried in vain to grasp them before the floodwaters bore them beyond her reach. Scenes from her childhood, scenes from her teens--_backyard cookouts, Buffy and cousin Celia tying her to the tree while playing Power Girl and forgetting her, the spelling bee, lying awake in the night and listening to Mom and Dad argue while Buffy held her tight, the divorce, moving to Sunnydale, Angelus's mocking eyes and sharp fangs_\--whirled away from her one by one and sucked into oblivion by a savage undertow of power. She was dissolving, eroding from the inside out, and no one could see her, no one could tell.

She didn't see the man in the Dodgers T-shirt stumble around the corner of the alley and stand there swaying back and forth at the sight before him, a bubbling moan rising from his throat. She didn't see Spike, staring at her through the humming beams of light, his dark brows twisted in an expression of desperate confusion. Dawn Summers was beyond seeing anything at all.

"!la muchacha verde del sol!" wailed Ramon, rushing towards Dawn and enveloping her in a bear-hug. His weight staggered her, pushing her off the sephira, and at once the net of power snapped and collapsed in a tangle of hissing green loops. Dawn, rag-doll limp, sagged in Ramon's arms while he hugged her and babbled broken prayers and entreaties in Spanish. A bone-chilling snarl of rage split the night, thin and small after the music of the spheres still ringing through Dawn's head, and a lean black-and-ivory blur tore Ramon away from her.

"Not this time, you sodding bastard!" Ramon's garbled entreaties became a scream of terror, choked off short as Spike slammed him into the pavement, fingers clamped around his throat--the grip that could snap a human neck in an instant, long before Buffy, at the opposite end of the alley, could reach him. If Buffy and everyone else hadn't been jarred off their feet by the unexpected breaking of the spell. If Buffy and everyone else weren't blinking and trying to figure out what Spike was doing with the... something, someone, nothing important.

She was still carrying the stupid clipboard, and couldn't for the life of her let go.

The vampire's eyes were flat golden coins in the dim light of the alley, and his fangs gleamed. "Spike!" Dawn choked out. She couldn't get up and stop him. All her joints were on fire. She was dizzy and aching, her whole body a taut rind of pain surrounding a ringing emptiness which yearned after the very power which had nearly destroyed it. But even before she spoke, something in his stance changed, lapsing from immanent slaughter to a relaxed predator's stillness ready to explode into violence again at any moment. His free hand went to the inside pocket of his duster for a second, and his eyes dropped to Dawn's. "He hurt you, pet. Shall I kill him?"

His tone was utterly conversational, as if he were commenting on the weather or asking her if she wanted sausage or pepperoni on her pizza. She'd fantasized about this, hadn't she? Her own pet vampire--better be nice to me, or he'll bite your head off. Only now it was real, and Spike was looking down at her with those terrible eyes and Dawn knew without a single doubt in the world that if she said _ yes_ Spike would rip Ramon's head right off, slam-dunk his skull in the dumpster and use his severed carotid for a drinking fountain. And the only possible thing that would stop him would be Buffy saying _ no_ a little bit faster, but Buffy was still shaking shards of green light out of her head and crawling over to see if Willow was all right. And the worst thing was seeing the eager, vicious light in his eyes and the way his tongue curled over the rending points of his fangs and knowing, also without a doubt in the world, that her good pal Spike was really, really hoping she'd say yes.

"No," she rasped. "No, he didn't... he kinda saved me, I think. The spell..." Her knees wobbled, and in an instant Spike had dropped Ramon and was at her side, holding her up.

"Dawn-love, you're--" He placed one palm, chill as the air around them, on her forehead. Felt so good, like pressing her face to an air-conditioned window-pane in summer. "Burning up! What're you doing here?" His eyes, blue again but no less deadly, scanned the alleyway. He glanced down at the clipboard and raised an eyebrow, then yanked it out of Dawn's hands before she could object. "Who gave you this?"

"Willow," Dawn said. Spike growled, a sound like a jaguar swallowing a rusty buzzsaw, and flung the clipboard across the alley with force enough to shatter it against the far wall. Uh oh. Willow would be pissed. Dawn's head felt muzzy. _I just saved a man's life. Ramon would be little shredded bloody lumps right now if I'd said 'yes.'_ All Spike's cool stories about little girls in coal bins had happened to people as real as Ramon was.

"Dawn!" Buffy shrieked, scrambling to her feet. "What are you doing here? Are you all right?"

The world was starting to spin. How come she always ended up fainting just as things got exciting? It wasn't fair. "Spike..."

"Yeh, snack-size?"

"You're evil."

His face didn't show anything, and that in itself was unusual for Spike. "'Fraid so." He gave Ramon a kick in the head to make him stay down, whipped off his duster and wadded it up. "Here, have a lie-down."

Part of her wanted to protest that no, she wasn't going to lie down, this was _important_, but Spike's big cool hands felt so wonderful on the hot papery skin of her cheeks, and it was easier to sink down onto the cushion of worn black leather, breathe in the comforting smell of bourbon and smoke and close her eyes.

She heard her sister's anxious voice from a million miles away: "Give her here--oh, Dawn, oh, God, Dawn..." Buffy reached for her, taking her from Spike's arms and cradling her to her chest. Small and slender as Buffy was, Dawn felt insubstantial in comparison, translucent enough to see through her own flesh to her bones. Spike gave her hand a last squeeze and got slowly to his feet.

A swirl of dislodged memories fluttered down onto the surface of her consciousness: Spike slumped in the beanbag chair in a mute, inexplicable fury, the emberglow of Willow's hair in the basement light, and the prickly-musty scent of crushed herbs. Dawn had a moment to think _Waitaminute, the chip_\-- And then there was darkness, and it felt awfully good.

*****

When the veils of everyday reality were stripped away, the world was a CGI wonderland of interlocking lines of force. A vast matrix of mystic lines of force, indigo, black, and violet, swirled round the vortex of the Hellmouth. Crumpled sheets of shimmering bronze and copper underlay them, power of the earth itself, too vast for any single wizard to bend to his will. The trace-lines of a thousand thousand spells cast in Sunnydale over the last century wove and tangled throughout, glowing in mauve and azure and gold: old spells, new spells, spells of ward and guard, spells to lure, spells to deceive, spells to find money and love and power, all paling before the new-cast glory of the spell she was weaving now.

Tides of magic surged through and around her, and Willow reached out, grasped them bare-handed and wrested them into the shapes she desired. No clumsy approximation of word and gesture here, no dithering over whether toadflax or motherwort would produce the effect closest to what she wanted. She was working directly with raw magic, fresh from the heartspring of the universe.

Auras shone around her--Buffy and Spike in gold and ebony, Tara in pale springtime green, Xander royal blue, Anya violet, Giles a startling black-shot scarlet. Dawn outblazed them all, a pure and endless paean of brilliant emerald light radiating outwards in all directions. Willow trapped the power in the rose and gold net of the sephiroth, bound it, shaped it, sent it singing back in complex chords of emerald and olivine. Without the strength provided by her silent partner, she could never have hoped to control this wild floodtide of power. It would have burnt her to the bone in seconds. But with it--with it she was Morgan Le Fay, Titania, Endora, all rolled into one.

She could see the traces of Tanner's brainsuck spell as sluggish bruise-colored whorls in the auras of the crazies, and of Tanner himself. The flaws in his technique were obvious, as was what she'd need to do to repair the damage to her minds for once and all. With complete assurance Willow plucked a strand of light here, tweaked a node of power there, calling on the green just as she'd called on Glory's stolen power to heal Tara. Malachite arpeggios with descants of aquamarine danced from node to node along the net, meeting and parting and meeting again in cascades of creme-de-menthe sparks. Tanner first. Child's play to send verdant cascades of light down the ley-lines of power, focusing the energy she commanded on Yesod and illuminating a mind cloaked in the shadows of madness. The torch of her power banished the horrors back to the sub-basements of thought they'd crawled up from, forging new paths from axon to dendrite in a springtime glow of renewal.

She could sense Tanner's connection to the three crazies within the compass of the spell, and all the others as well, bonds forged of a long summer of shared misery. Willow's senses telescoped out along the lines of power. Three more in Weatherly Park, six more back at the dump, and a lone figure shambling down Main Street, goal-less and forlorn. Ramon. She knew his name, his history, could see in the mangled remnants of his mind a wife, a daughter, a life--he'd been an auto mechanic in the Chevron station on Fourth an eternity ago. And she, Willow Rosenberg, was going to return him to all that. Fix him. Fix all of them. She could do that.

So simple, so easy, to take up the reins from Tanner's lax grasp and make them her own. The spell-cords binding the crazies to Tanner lit up like a bundle of glow-sticks at a rave as she sent power flooding through Yesod and into Tiphareth. _Come to me!_ Her partner was pleased with her; she could feel its dark rejoicing thrumming through her veins. Could she go farther? Do more? Could she just reach out, like so, reel in the cords and draw them all here...?

The cords resisted her efforts. Impatient, Willow called on more power, and it answered her summons willingly. The universe could well spare this tithe of its substance in a good cause. Somewhere someone was crying out in pain, but no matter--she'd fix that too, in good time. It would take too long to wait for the crazies to come here, she decided. Why not send healing to them directly? First to the six in the dump, then...

Without warning the spell snapped with all the force of an axe-cut hawser, and Willow howled in agony as it lashed her mind in a whip-crack of thwarted power. **_NO!_** screamed the black voice. **_Too soon! She was supposed to die!_** The Tree of Life contained and deflected the worst of the damage as Willow tumbled headlong from the exalted heights of pure magic, falling back into the confines of her own body with bone-jarring force.

At first she thought it was the black voice again, but no, it had come from outside her head. Willow realized she was lying face-down in a heap in the alley, her nose mashed into the oil-spattered concrete. She fumbled with her hands--she couldn't remember exactly how to work them for a minute--got them underneath her torso and shoved herself upright. Groans and whimpers reached her ears from all sides; only Buffy and Spike were still more or less standing, courtesy of supernatural muscle, but everyone seemed to be moving. A warm trickle crawled down her neck and her fingers came away smeared with crimson when she rubbed at it. Something had gone wrong. The crazy she'd called--darn, he hadn't been bound by the spell, and he'd blundered into Dawn, wrecking the whole thing. She'd have to start it all over to take care of the rest of them...

An inhuman yowl of rage interrupted her meandering thoughts. Seeing Dawn in physical danger must have been enough for Spike's natural vampiric resistance to spells of mental confusion to kick in. For a second he crouched over the terrified crazy, a hawk over a rabbit, his duster mantled like great black wings. A second later he'd abandoned his prey to rush to Dawn's side, and a second after that, the clipboard spun past Willow's ear and smashed into three pieces against the bricks.

_Oopsie_.

Buffy, just putting a hand to Willow's shoulder and ask if she were all right, froze as she realized what had been going on in front of her eyes for the last several minutes. She took off towards her sister like a scalded cat. Willow groaned and buried her face in her hands. It was all going wrong!

The chill black voice demanded, **_ Renew the spell. Do it now, while all is still prepared._**

_Whoa, whoa, whoa,_ Willow protested. _ Do you fail to notice the mass disruption, here? Buffy freakage? General debilitation and achiness? No way can I put this spell back together right this red-hot minute. And what's this about the dying? No dying! Maybe we should all just take a juice break or something and calm down-_-

**_You blind, stupid little fool,_** the dark voice said. **_The Key's mortal form was to be destroyed in this spell. The vampire would then turn on you as the author of her demise, and the Slayer would be forced to destroy him. Or he would destroy her--either outcome would have been acceptable. Thus would the Balance have been restored. But now the Key lives, and--_** It cut off as Willow looked up and saw Spike rise and begin a fluid stalk towards her, murder burning in his ice-colored eyes and every lineament of his body. **_ But perhaps,_** it continued rather more cheerfully, _**all is not yet lost.**_

*****

"You _lied_ to me, Red." Half a dozen swift steps covered the distance he'd taken in a single leap going the other direction. "Told me Dawn wasn't going to get _hurt._" Willow was still on hands and knees in the alleyway, looking up at him with her hair all wild about her pale, shocky face, her sweet little strawberry of a mouth hanging open. She swayed to her feet, alley dirt all over the knees of her hippy-dippy Indian-print skirt and the top that almost but not quite didn't match--never was a clotheshorse, was Red, not in her high school days, not now. Spike kept coming, step by step, backing her up against the alley wall, slapping palm to the bricks behind her and blocking her escape with his outstretched arm. She shoved at him, but she might as well have been shoving brick and steel; no one without Slayer strength could hope to budge a vampire who didn't intend to be budged.

"What happened to 'I can kill you,' Red?" He lowered his face to hers, nose to nose, and he knew it was a hell of a lot scarier that his features remained perfectly human while the look in his eyes was anything but. "Dr. Evil leave you a bit short on the old mojo?" She was bleeding from a scrape on her temple, and scarcely noticing what he did, Spike drew a finger across her cheek, held it up to the light, and licked it clean. Always suspected Red would taste divine.

Willow cringed back against the bricks. "No! I didn't mean...I never thought... Spike, you--you like me! You wouldn't--you said you wouldn't--!"

His voice dropped to a rasping growl. "I like lots of people, Red. Doesn't stop me from getting a grin out of their messy demise." He wasn't enjoying this nearly as much as he should have. Bugger. "Bloody hell, Will, you sodding near fried Dawn! What the _fuck_ are you playing at?"

By the time he'd finished the sentence there was more bewilderment than threat in his voice, and the face before him changed. There was no other word for it; panic and confusion and horror drained away, replaced by a hard, calculating smile in a transformation as complete and profound as if she'd switched to game face. "I'm not playing, Spike. Your mistake if you think I am." Her eyes went onyx, and she drove both small fists at him simultaneously, a blow he'd barely have felt had it only been physical. The stink of ozone bit his sinuses, and black-violet lightning arced from her hands to his chest. Needles of fire and ice exploded throughout his quiescent heart and Spike reeled backwards with a scream of agony. Willow took to her heels and ran.

_For future reference, Spike old lad, if Will says she can kill you, she means it_. If she hadn't been weakened from the backlash of the interrupted spell, he'd be ash right now; power that could send a Harrier packing could incinerate a vampire in seconds. Hugging the excruciating throb in his chest, Spike turned for a quick look at Buffy; she was talking to a still-groggy Giles about the pros and cons of taking Dawn to a hospital or just getting her home to bed. She caught his eye: _Take care of it, Spike_.

For a moment he thought of bringing Tara along; she might be able to reason with Will where nothing he could say would penetrate. But Tara didn't look much better off than Dawn was, huddled in a sick soft heap on the ground with Anya fussing over her. Xander was trying to keep Tanner and company from panicking. _Well, then. Looks like the cavalry is you._

Tracking conditions on Main were terrible--cold dry air that didn't hold a scent well, and hundreds of competing odors to confuse the trail. But Willow'd passed this way only a minute or two ago, and creature of the sodding night, here. Spike vamped out and stood still as death, listening with ears that could hear worms crawling in the ground below the sidewalk. He took a deep breath, held it, testing the air--_Yeah. That way_\--and took off running, following the distant drumbeat of running feet and the fugitive scent of cinnamon.

She'd been smart, taken a corner as soon as she could to get out of his line of sight, but it wasn't enough; he caught and cornered her against a parked Mercury within three blocks. This time he didn't press his luck, keeping a wary distance between them. "Don't want to hurt you, Will--"

"Oh, don't you?" Willow said with a wild laugh. "Sure looked like you wanted to back there! And I didn't see Buffy the Vampire Layer rushing in to save me, either!"

"Bit occupied with her sis, don't you think?"

"It wasn't supposed to happen this way!" Willow's resolve face peeled away, revealing bone-deep misery beneath. "You don't get it. You can't get it. I couldn't let her down again! You don't know what it's like to be this--this boring, ordinary, mouse of a person, when everyone else around you is magic! When you'd do anything to be special, make them notice--"

Spike threw up his hands with an eye-roll that would have done Buffy proud. "Oh, give it a rest! I'm a fucking vampire, Will! How'd'you think I got this way, sent in boxtops?" He schooled his restless body to stillness again and tried for coaxing. "Come on back with me, pet, tell us what's going on and all's forgiven--you know that."

"With you? After that little performance in the alley? Incendiere!" Willow gestured and red and gold flames blazed up in a ring all around her, scorching the paint job on the Mercury, and Spike fell back with a surprised yelp. "How stupid do you think I am?"

_Spike, you're evil._ Well, so he was, he'd never made a big secret of the fact. "Stopped, didn't I?" he demanded. "Both times. D'you think Buffy would've sent me after you if she thought--"

"Stopped?" Willow laughed. "Come on. Got stopped, you mean. Wittle Dawnie got upset. Well, Dawn's not here, and Buffy's not here, and you don't care quite as much about the rest of us, do you?"

His hand moved towards his duster pocket, tracing the outline of the flat stiff rectangle within. "As a matter of fact--"

Willow's face underwent another transformation, from desperation to wicked amusement, unnerving in its swiftness; for a second Spike was reminded of expressions Darla used to get. The ring of flames parted for her like the Red Sea, and Willow swayed towards him. "Didn't you want to kill me there for a moment, when you thought I'd hurt your precious little Dawn? And you do _like_ me, Spike. I can tell." Her voice had grown low and sultry, almost teasing, and her eyes were orbs of polished jet against the pale, flawless skin of her face. She walked straight up to him and slipped her arms around his waist; Spike, stunned into immobility, made no move to stop her. "Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet." She reached up and tapped a finger to the tip of his nose. "No. More. Chip."

She arched her neck, exposing the pale, perfect line of her throat, and the roots of Spike's fangs began to ache; he could feel the points of his canines digging into his lower lip. "You know you want it," Willow whispered. "It would be easy, right now, when I'm not so much with the big magic. You could bite me right here. Bite me, take me. Up against the wall. I'd scream. You'd like that, wouldn't you? How long since anyone's been really afraid of Big Bad Spike?"

Oh God in Heaven, far, far too long. Hypnotized by possibilities, his head dropped towards the delicious angle where her neck met her shoulder, lower, lower. "That's right," Willow crooned. "This is what you're meant for. You're so tired of fighting yourself, aren't you?" The blood-scent was fresh and maddening, far more so than such a small cut should have been. "You want this. You ache with every fiber of your being for the simple, sure days when you were Death incarnate, clad in power and glory. You don't have to pretend any longer. You can take what you want again. I'd be afraid," she whispered. "I'm not really into boys any longer, but you're _ very_ pretty, and maybe I'd even--"

Her scent rose up around him like an herb garden in summer, mint and cinnamon and rosemary and _Willow_, warm and living. Willow who'd given him a cookie to wash the Buffy-taste out of his mouth. Spike shoved her away with frantic strength. "No," he gasped, chest heaving like he'd just come off a marathon. "No."

Willow fell back through the flames and banged into the door of the car, face twisted in fury. She slammed her fist against the hot metal, heedless of the blistering paint. "Who do you think you're kidding, Spike? You _want_ this! I can feel desire coming off you in waves!"

Spike shook himself, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth. "Sounds awfully familiar, this. Someone gave me a pretty speech just like it once before. Blah-de-blah, beast who must and will be free--soon as you do what I want you to, Spike, soon as you play fetch and carry all over Robin Hood's barn, Spike, soon as you change the leash you're wearing for the shiny new one I've got behind my back, Spike. Well, tough on you, the chip's out already and you've no more cards to play on me. And maybe I still have a yen for slaughter now and then, but you don't. You're not Will. I don't know what--"

"Oh, I'm Willow, all right," she sneered. "You think anything but what Willow wanted, what Willow decided was best, got us here tonight? This is the way it always works. I suggest, I explain, I point out the obvious--but it's always they who act. But you?" Her voice dripped scorn. "You were magnificent, once. You were an extraordinary monster. Now? You're pathetic, pretending you're on their side when everything in you cries out to be on the other. You can try for the rest of your damned existence and you'll never be good, never be more than a killer on a leash--and your leash is _gone_, Spike. You say you know what it is to want more? Well, _more's_ right here." She yanked the collar of her blouse down. "All you have to do is reach out and _take_ it. Because you _can_."

Spike stood trembling. That was the only reason he'd ever done anything, when it came down to it--because he could. Two years, two long years defined by _can'ts_\-- can't hunt, can't feed, can't so much as kick someone in the shins without calling a firestorm of pain down on his head. Over now, and had it really sunk in yet? He could _kill_. "No."

Willow smiled, licking her own blood from her chin. "Give me one good reason," she whispered, "why not."

Spike squeezed his eyes shut, seeing the face of the woman he loved, the woman he'd live for, die for, kill for--_not_ kill for. _I didn't think I'd need to._

In that moment he almost got it. Almost, not quite--as close as a creature of sodding darkness could come, maybe, on short notice with the smell of blood and smoke in his nose. Spike opened his eyes, and his hand went to his duster pocket again. He pulled out the envelope Lisa had given him that morning, slightly dog-eared now, and flipped it at Willow. The uprush of heated air caught it and sent it dancing across the flames for a moment before it fluttered, dipped, and burst into flame. For a brief second the bright colors of the card within showed through the charring envelope, and then they too were gone.

"Because I've gotten a taste for being treated like a man, Will. Or whatever you are. Found I quite fancy it. And if I want to be treated like a man, I'd bloody well better act like one, hadn't I? What the fuck has a century of being evil gotten me? Dru left me, Angelus betrayed me, Darla--that bitch never gave me anything but grief to begin with! At least I know the white hats'll stand by their own."

Willow flung back her head and laughed, a completely delightful sound. "Act like a man? You mean pausing to ask permission of a fifteen-year-old girl before eviscerating a man for... what, exactly? Being in your way? All that stands between you and total carnage again is the whim of a couple of children less than a fifth your age. Spike, Spike, Spike--if this is the best imitation of a man you can manage, what happens when they stop treating you like one?"

With that she brought both hands together with thunderclap force. The ring of flame roared up, twenty feet tall and red as blood, then winked out, taking Willow with it. Spike stood alone on the sidewalk, staring at the ring of charred pavement and blistered paint which was all the evidence left that Willow had ever been there at all, ran a hand through his soot-streaked hair and muttered, "Bloody hell. Knew there had to be a catch to it."


	29. Chapter 29

There was a monster in her bedroom.

Dawn lay in bed, watching him through her eyelashes. The monster had been sitting in a straight-backed chair, reading _The Maltese Falcon_ in the dark, but at some point in the night he'd fallen asleep and slumped over sideways onto the foot of her bed. Pearly predawn light washed over the curve of his shoulder and spilled into his pale hair--another half-hour and he'd be in big trouble if he didn't wake up. His mouth was open slightly and the wire-rimmed reading glasses he fondly imagined he'd kept hidden from her over the summer were askew on his nose.

Monsters drooled in their sleep.

She felt like crap. Someone had vacuumed out her insides, and there was a weird crawly feeling in her stomach when she looked at Spike. It took her awhile to pin it down. It wasn't fear. It wasn't disgust. It wasn't shock or horror or any of the things she really ought to have been feeling while looking at a monster. It was just... the knowledge that he _was_ a monster, a hot, embarrassed how-could-I-be-so-stupid feeling akin to the day she'd realized that Santa Claus really was just Dad in a funny suit, except with massacres. If this was adulthood, it sucked.

The door to her room eased open a few inches and Buffy's right eye appeared in the crack, followed shortly by the rest of her, slim golden hands clutching a burqa of white terrycloth tightly around her torso. Her eyes, even sans eyeshadow and mascara, were huge hazel pools in her small, sharp-chinned face, her posture drawn in brushstrokes of apprehension. When she saw that Dawn was awake, she let out a small sigh and with it some of the tension. She slipped inside, caught Dawn's eye and held a finger to her lips: _Don't wake him_, walked over to the window and pulled the drapes shut.

"Why?" Dawn whispered.

Buffy gave her a _duh_ look. "Not looking forward to explaining the burnt vampire smell to the insurance adjuster when I try to claim the charred carpet on our homeowner's policy?"

"Not that." Dawn struggled upright against the pillows. Her limbs were leaden, like she had bowling balls strapped to her ankles. "I mean... OK, today you love him. But you didn't used to. Why didn't you ever kill him?"

Her sister stopped beside Spike's chair and reached down to straighten out his glasses, smoothing his hair back from his high forehead. "I don't know," she said. "I tried. Just like he tried to kill me." Buffy tugged one wavy lock free, gel crackling as she wound it around her forefinger and let it spring back into its natural curl. "I guess our hearts weren't in it."

Buffy's heart hadn't been in killing Angelus, but she'd done it. "Did you ever see anyone he killed?"

Slim golden fingers, playing through hair the color of bleached bones. Buffy sighed. "You want a catalog? Dell and Dwayne Robichaud, throats torn out. Sherri Addison's dad, broken neck. Steve Laughton's dad, broken... everything. Sheila Martini--technically Dru killed her, but Spike's the one who brought home take-out. That was Week One." The moving fingers paused. "Dawn...is something--?"

"I was just curious." Dawn sank back down into the bed and burrowed down under the quilt, poking Spike in the nose as her feet shifted beneath the covers.

Spike woke with a snort, losing his glasses entirely as he jerked himself upright. He stared wildly around the room for a moment, yellow-eyed with surprise, then broke into a huge grin when he saw she'd woken up. "Dawn! How're you feeling, Pidge?"

"I'm OK." This was where she should reach out and hug him, because she knew Spike loved getting hugged but was too much ultra-cool vampire guy to ever admit it. Her arms just lay there like slugs on the patchwork squares of the quilt. Dawn pasted a return smile onto her face, but she didn't know what to say to him any longer, and a second later his smile faltered.

He knew. Predator's senses or just reasonably perceptive guy, he could see the wariness in her eyes and feel the new distance stretching between them. Spike swallowed, picked up his book and got to his feet, not even bothering to get embarrassed about the glasses. "I'll just be off, then, let you get some more sleep."

A pang lanced her heart as she watched him leave, leaving a hollow ache behind. She and Spike had possessed something between them that he didn't have even with Buffy, and now it was gone. Should she call him back, tease him about the glasses and try to pretend everything was the same as it had been? Only yesterday she'd have known exactly what words to use.

"I'll bring you some breakfast later," Buffy said, pausing in the doorway with one hand on the frame. "And I'll call in sick for you at school. Assuming they're open again after the whole cafeteria demon thingy. Giles says you should just try to rest as much as possible today." A small vertical line appeared between her brows as she looked from Dawn to Spike and back again, aware that something was out of kilter but unable to ascertain what. Dawn rolled over and pulled her quilt up over her ears, and after a second of lip-biting, Buffy left.

Spike remained in the doorway a moment longer, a sweet wistful smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "G'bye, Niblet."

"Goodbye, Spike," she whispered as he followed Buffy down the hall. Did she want to cry? She wasn't sure. In the end she just lay there, empty, too tired to feel anything at all. She should have asked about Willow, but maybe Buffy didn't know.

It took her longer than she wanted to get back to sleep.

*****

Three drops of ink squeezed from the eyedropper, one after the other, drip, drip, drip into the pie-plate full of Evian. Willow sat cross-legged on her old bed in her old room at her parents' house, gazing intently at the makeshift scrying bowl balanced on the coverlet before her. She passed a hand over the water. "Reveal," she whispered. The ink swirled, forming a fractal whirlpool of indigo on the surface of the water. The Summers house emerged from the coiling lines of ink, with Spike's motorcycle parked in the driveway, in the middle of the oil spot left by the DeSoto. She made another pass over the water, and the image wavered, but she couldn't bring up the interior of the house.

"Are you sure you don't want any breakfast, dear?"

Willow chewed on her lower lip. "No, Mom," she hollered through the closed door. "I'm not hungry. I'll fix some cereal before I go to class."

There was a pause. "You know, Willow, if you and your...um...friend had a fight, then opening an honest dialogue is paramount to--"

Willow ground the heel of her hand into the bridge of her nose and tuned her mother's voice out. She'd spent half of last night in a frantic casting of spells of obscuration and concealment around herself, and twice already this morning she'd felt the feeble scratchings of someone trying to penetrate them--Giles, maybe, or Anya; it hadn't been Tara's familiar touch. She'd had five hours of sleep, had a pounding headache, and the more she thought about last night the worse things got. She couldn't be a bad guy, could she? No bad guy was so lame as to have to run home to Mommy and Daddy with some cheeseball story about a fight with Tara, begging for a place to spend the night. No, she just needed time to sort things out, that was all.

"...so if you're questioning your ego definition on this level, honey, maybe it's time to..."

"I'll think about it, Mom. Aren't you late for work?"

There were spells of ward and protection laid about the Summers house, too--nothing too fancy, just the old standards. They coccooned the house in an intricate cat's-cradle of rose and saffron threads. Tara had cast them when the two of them moved in; Willow had been too weakened in the aftermath of Buffy's Raising to help. Now she could rip right through them, but the idea of wantonly destroying Tara's work made her ache. Willow reached out with something that wasn't her hand and began picking the spell apart, thread by thread by thread, slowly insinuating herself into the weave and allowing her own power to flow through unhindered. "Reveal."

_The ink swirls, and she is drawn into the world it inscribes upon the quicksilver surface of the water._

Willow walks. It is not she who is the ghost, but the world around her; walls part like smoke, and misty wisps of brick and stucco cling to her skirt as she passes them by. Here is Dawn's room with its teen-aged clutter of posters and books and clothes. The hidden corners are still drifted with toys, too childish to play with and too beloved to give away. Dawn lies on the bed, the human shell of her tossing in the restless slumber of innocence lost, the ageless heart of her being pulsing raw green power for any who dares grasp it.

The part of Willow still sitting on the bed drew a sob of relief. Dawn was alive. She hadn't burnt all her bridges yet. She'd lost her way in the woods, and though the slick black voice in her head was no Virgil, maybe Tara would still be willing to play Beatrice. She could honestly claim she'd had no idea that the spell would harm Dawn. Of course, then she'd have to explain where she'd gotten the part of the spell which tapped into Dawn's power...and worse, why she'd tapped into Dawn's power in the first place. She couldn't just go traipsing back, not without knowing more about Buffy's mood and what the others thought had happened. Another pass. "Reveal."

Swirl.

_Buffy's room is empty. The window is open and the morning breeze lifts the curtains, carrying away the musk of sex and blood. The scents are old, and the walls carry no echo of soft cries and sharp pleas--the bed is rumpled, but there was no sporting in this room last night, nor any room. The top drawer of the dresser is open slightly, and there are a few pairs of newly-washed black t-shirts visible through the crack. In the bathroom across the hall, there is a third toothbrush in the holder._

The vampire stares blearily at the nothingness in the mirror (his sleep schedule has been shot to hell) and draws the razor carefully along the line of his jaw; when he flicks the shaving cream off into the sink, it abruptly pops into visibility. Being a monster, he cannot truly understand why the fact of his being so troubles the girl in the room down the hall. Yet her withdrawal pains him terribly, in a manner no monster should feel.

In the master bedroom, Tara lies sleeping, curled around the empty space where her absent love should be. Her beautiful face has none of its usual serenity. She moans and cries out as she feels Willow walk unseen through the secret places of the house, reaching out with her round soft arms, and Willow shies away, fearful of waking her, fearful of breaking the spell.

Buffy is downstairs. Worry and fear coil around her, a grey miasma, but she denies them power--she is cooking breakfast; waffles enough to feed a small army, and eggs and toast (there are no strawberries, and this is a source of vast unease, because there should, there should be strawberries with waffles, but they are out of season and they have no money and the lack means she is a bad sister, a bad friend and a terrible Slayer).

There is the ritual of breakfast for sick people: Buffy brings waffles on trays, and Dawn and Tara wake and stir and pick fretfully at their food, and demand newspapers or milk or whatever Buffy has forgotten to bring. Spike comes downstairs and he and Buffy eat the rest of the waffles, syrup on hers, pig's blood on his. They talk about last night in low voices; Buffy has grasped that the removal of the chip was not something he sought, but she suspects nothing of Willow's involvement, and the cobalt bonds of the geas still hold Spike mute. They move gradually closer as they talk, their auras sparking, red-gold and crimson-lit ebony--

A burst of unfocused tantric energy shattered the image into wild ink-squiggles and Willow fell back, almost kicking over the pie plate with one rabbit-slippered foot. "Whoa." She shook her head and sat up. She shouldn't have been surprised; two supernatural creatures of diametrically opposed natures making whoopie was bound to produce a few mystic aftershocks, especially when supernatural creatures in question acted like they'd spontaneously combust if they went for more than twelve hours without an orgasm.

Willow slumped a little and rubbed her eyes. Should she try the Magic Box? The shop had far more effective wards, though, and she wasn't sure if she could hack them without alerting Giles. Besides, she had a mission: find out when Tara was recovered enough to talk. The squicky fascination of spying on your friends was just bonus material. She attempted to visualize the kitchen again and got one fleeting glimpse of Buffy licking syrup off Spike's chest before another wild surge of static kicked her out again. It was impossible to spy effectively when she was constantly forced to pan to fireplace. _I'm never, ever going to eat off the dining room table again._

Periodic checks in the scrying bowl over the remainder of the morning revealed that when Buffy and Spike were alone, they were groping each other 75.3% of time. Spike made another attempt to give Buffy grocery money, and the fifteen-minute argument over same culminated in the wig-inducing spectacle of Buffy taking the money and roaring off in the Cherokee. _No wonder Spike used to get so disgusted when we foiled his plans. Possibly insane, power-mad witch on loose, Slayer on major shopping spree at Albertson's_. When Buffy returned, Spike had thoughtfully cleaned and oiled her various implements of destruction, and was on the phone with Clem, having a mysterious conversation about customers and the fact that someone named Teeth wasn't going to like it, whatever it was. The two of them spent the rest of the morning doing exciting things like dishes, laundry, and each other on top of the dryer, which shorted out the scrying spell again (and a good thing too). Even Slayers and vampires had to spend ninty percent of their lives doing everyday ordinary stuff, or at best supervising minions who did it for them, but watching them at it was boring beyond belief.

An hour later, Willow sat in the back of the darkened Art History 302 lecture hall, watching the slides of Rosso's "Descent From the Cross" melt into Parmigiano's "Madonna With The Long Neck" on the screen and listening to Professor Alpert drone on about the philosophical underpinnings of the Mannerist school of painting. She scribbled out 'Mannerism -- 1525-1600. Artist's inner vision supercedes twin authorities of nature &amp; the ancients. Deliberate physical &amp; spatial distortions employed to make aesthetic point.' She could relate to that. She felt distorted out of all recognition. She could look back over all the things she'd done over the past two weeks and see that each individual decision made sense as she made it, but when she put it all together, the picture was subtlely off. _Pretty sure that begging Spike to kill me isn't normal behavior._ Her fingers tightened on her pen, and Willow added, 'Kid in painting looks dead. Gross' to her notes.

Except...she'd wanted it. Even as she'd listened in horror to the words pouring from her mouth, something within her had exulted when Spike's fangs grazed her neck, and wailed in abandoned fury when he pulled away. _You didn't want to bite me, I just happened to be around._ But ugh, ick, blech, that couldn't be her! She didn't want to die!

**_Of course not_**.

The girl in the seat in front of her turned around and smiled at Willow with her own face gone ridged and fangy. "But you're sure he wouldn't have left you dead. I work with what I'm given, oh Willow-titwillow-titwillow," she said with a pout. "Some little part of you wonders what it would be like to be immortal and invulnerable--is that my fault?"

Willow bent over her notes, and whispered, "One: Shut up. Two: Leave."

The ebony voice purled through her skull, closer than her skin to her flesh. _**Leave? As well tell your shadow to walk away. I am within you, I am of you, as you are of me. We are one now, of your own free choice. A choice that cannot be unmade. I have given you everything you desired, have I not?**_

It had. She could still feel it, a La Brea Tar Pit of dark power bubbling away beneath the surface of her soul. But she couldn't use it. She buried her face in her hands, grateful for the darkness of the auditorium. At least she'd completed her three tasks, and the bargain wasn't hanging over her head any longer.

An amused chuckle reverberated through her mind. **_Isn't it? There remain eleven of Tanner's people who are still quite mad. Until you have used the Key's power to cleanse their minds, your bargain remains unfulfilled and your power is only on loan._**

"I don't want your stupid power anymore!" Willow hissed, attracting stares from her classmates on either side. Cheeks flaming, she oozed down into her seat.

"Does that matter any longer? You have it. And it cries out for use." Willow swallowed a shocked yip; Professor Alpert had been replaced by Jenny Calendar. None one else seemed to notice anything peculiar; the rest of the students were dutifully scribbling notes about the stylistic contrasts between Mannerist and late Renaissance art. Jenny leaned forward, arms folded against the podium, and smiled. "But let's not get hung up on details. What I want, Willow, is to restore the Balance. Have you forgotten that it's still in danger?"

_Well, boo big flipping hoo,_ Willow shot back. _I may be special needs girl for not figuring this out sooner, but the whole 'let's kill your best friend's sister for the good of mankind and if that doesn't work attempt suicide by vampire' thing kind of gave it away. You're not working for the same side Whistler was, and if you think I'm going to kill Dawn or Buffy or even Spike to fix your precious Balance, you're crazier than Tanner!_

The illusion of her high school Comp. Sci. teacher sauntered over to the AV screen and tapped it with her pointer; the cool formalism of the long-necked Madonna was instantly replaced with an overhead view of Sunnydale. Jenny indicated the wreckage of the old high school. "The side I represent is irrelevant at this point. If the Balance isn't restored, then the Hellmouth will turn itself inside out in a matter of weeks. The forces of Light will over-run Sunnydale and slaughter the forces of Darkness, and anyone they see as having aided the forces of Darkness." She smiled, delighted by the prospect. "Do you have any idea how many demons live in this town, or how many people they deal with every day, all unawares?"

Willow gripped the arms of her seat and said nothing. Faux-Jenny continued, "Now, I'm not going to ask you to interfere on my behalf. Oh, no--that wasn't part of our bargain, and I always keep the letter of my promises. I don't even object to the slaughter. There are always more demons to be had. I'm just pointing out that our bargain is not complete, and at the moment, my advantage is your advantage. Unless you want to see your town laid waste... for its own good."

_Luminous shapes with wings of light and swords of flame mow down students like wheat. The wind carries screams and the charcoal stench of burnt skin. She stands knee-deep in blood as arcane energies bath the skies overhead and bodies boil and explode from within like turkey giblets in a microwave. The campus is a demonic Arlington, an endless field of corpses human and otherwise, bloated and rotting in the pale winter sunlight. Flocks of ravens fight seagulls for the eyes of the fallen..._

She was hyperventilating and everyone was looking at her funny. _You're lying._

"No. I may not tell the whole truth, but I've never needed to lie to you."

_Oh, right. Like 'Dawn won't be harmed if you use her power to cast this spell,' which is totally true, except for the part about Dawn not being harmed?_

Jenny sighed and tossed her dark curls over one shoulder. "Harm is such a relative word. The Key cannot be destroyed, only transformed. By all means let's wait and do nothing, Willow. Buffy waited, and that worked so well for me, didn't it?" Jenny's eyes bugged out and her smile split into a hideous death's-head grin, drooling blood as her head lolled broken-necked to one side. Willow jerked backwards, scrambling half-way over the back of her seat with a shriek.

"Hey!" yelled the boy beside her. "Take a pill, will you?"

"_Silence!_" Willow snarled, fingers crooking in menace, and the boy's words choked off. He clutched his throat in panic as she gathered up her books and ran out of the auditorium.

*****

It was late afternoon when Tara descended the stairs, feeling as shattered as Picasso's nude. She'd slept off and on all day, rousing groggily when Buffy brought her sandwiches, but her brain was still floating several feet above the top of her head. Disjointed scenes from last night were starting to bubble one by one out of the foggy pit of her skull, brightly-colored blobs in a mental lava-lamp.

_Buffy cradling Dawn in her arms, tawny blonde hair spilling across chestnut brown. The girl's body was frail and hollow as the shed husk of a cicada._

Dizzy kaleidoscope of buildings and streetlights flashing by outside the SUV's windows. Hands, warm and cold, hauling her out of the car and upstairs.

Spike limping up scorched and shaken, his pale skin flecked with ash and the diamond-sharp angles of his cheekbones blunted with soot, a charcoal sketch of defeat.

Power surging through her, far more power than Willow should have been capable of summoning up. Power recoiling as she realized to her horror that Dawn had been standing on Kether from the beginning of the spell.

Xander flying at Spike, demanding to know what he'd done to Willow, and Spike turning on him with a wild-eyed snarl. Giles separating the two of them with a sharp word.

_ A hundred desperate repetitions of _Where is she? I have to find her!_ which no one would answer._

Voices drifted up to meet her, tone poems without meaning, Buffy's clarinet-crisp and light, Anya's staccato brass, Spike and Giles's tenor and alto sax... what was Xander? An accordion? A trombone? Tara repressed a giggle, afraid that if she started to laugh she'd never stop.

"...should've noticed sooner. Kept thinking there was something missing, and it turns out to be Dawn. What's the bloody good of..."

"None of us noticed." That was Giles. "Willow's an extraordinarily powerful witch, more than capable of tailoring the spell to affect you as well as the rest of us. It's difficult to cloud a vampire's mind, but not impossible. Especially one as, er, lacking in mental discipline as you are." Spike growled, but said nothing. "Dawn's young and healthy; she should recover, physically at least."

"At least?" There was a worried edge to Buffy's voice. "There's an other than physical?" There was a rustle and a creak, as of bodies rearranging themselves on furniture, and a soft indrawing of breath from Spike. "Does that still hurt?"

"Not so's it matters. She hadn't much juice left to hit me with, thank God for small favors."

_She? What she?_ Couldn't be Willow. Not possibly, not Willow who donated to Amnesty International and had frog fear and wouldn't shop at WalMart and hadn't wanted to shoot the horsies. Willow didn't hurt things. _No, no, no..._

"Second bloody shirt I've done for in as many days."

Tara rounded the corner into the living room. Giles was leaning up against the mantelpiece in a brown study, glasses in hand, studying them as if they were the last artefact of a ancient demonic civilization. Xander and Anya were scrunched up together at one end of the couch, and Spike was scrunched up next to Buffy at the other end. The no-man's-land in the middle was divided by a Maginot Line of half-folded laundry, stacks of black jeans, black t-shirts, and not-quite-so-black button-down shirts. The charred remains of Spike's striped sweater were stuffed haphazardly into the nearest wastebasket, and he was matching up pairs from a tangle of identical black socks. Every eye was on her, and Tara wanted to sink into the floor. Unfortunately she couldn't muster the magic to sink a toothpick into cream cheese right now.

"Tara!" Buffy leaped to her feet with desperate cheer. "You made it down!" Before she could protest, Tara found herself the target of a whirlwind of overwhelming Slayerly concern--Buffy wasn't exactly good at the whole nurturing thing, but she really, really tried. Five minutes later, she was ensconced in the armchair with Xander tucking one of Aunt Caroline's afghans tucked around her. "Here you go!" Buffy plunked a glass of warm milk (microwaved) a bowl of soup (Campbell's tomato, woefully lumpy) and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich down on the nearby end table with a bright smile.

"You shouldn't--" Tara started, but Buffy waved her objections away.

"No big. Your girlfriend's gone postal; the least I can do is provide comfort food. Is peanut butter OK? Do you need anything else? Green vegetables? I went shopping this morning, and I think some of the stuff I bought had leaves attached. Would you rather have chicken soup? We have cans; I can do cans--"

"And if you need a nip or two to set you up--" Spike indicated his hip flask and his heroic willingness to sacrifice the contents to her well-being.

"Um... thanks, but I already feel like I have a hangover." Tara picked up her sandwich and took a dutiful bite. If she didn't eat now she'd regret it tomorrow. Everyone was being extra-nice, even Spike, which always heralded badness.

After several minutes of furtive looks and strangled 'You!' 'No, you!' noises, Giles lost the battle for non-dominance and cleared his throat. "Tara, I'm sorry to press you on this so quickly, but is there a chance that you can cast a location spell to help us track down Willow?"

Tara held her sandwich in both hands and stared at the blob of grape jelly oozing slowly out from between the crusts of bread. Sugar and starch and protein, just what she needed, however unappealing the thought of chewing and swallowing was right now. "I... probably not for another day or so. I'm pretty much drained. You can't--?"

But Giles was shaking his head. "Anya and I made the attempt this morning. To make a long story short, we failed. All else being equal, Tara, you have a far more personal connection with Willow than I."

_Once. Not anymore._ Did she look as wretched as she felt? She had no idea who Willow was anymore. Had she ever known? And if she no longer knew Willow, who on earth was Tara McClay? "I--I'm not even sure what... I know the spell went bad. I don't know if Willow's..."

"She's fine," Xander said. Everything but his voice was screamed that Willow was anything but. "Fine." Anya squeezed his hand and for a second Tara hated them both, because they were all coupley and together and Willow was gone. "She was just... startled. By the end of the spell. She needs space. Spike went after her. Which is totally wrong. I should have gone. I--"

"I blame myself," Giles said, rubbing his eyes. He hadn't taken the kind of hit that Dawn or Tara had, but he did possess a modicum of magical talent and hadn't escaped the spell's backlash unscathed. "I should have supervised her more closely after--" He glanced across the Summers' dining room in the direction of the kitchen, where Buffy was attacking another loaf of bread as if it were all the fiends of hell. "The first... incident."

"You shouldn't," Tara protested. She shifted in the armchair, pulling the afghan closer around her shoulders against a sudden chill. "If anyone should have realized what was happening, it's me. I knew how hard she took losing her magic, I knew it was suspicious that she got her powers back all of a sudden--" A sob gathered in her throat and Tara forced it down with peanut butter.

"Ah, kitten, we all cocked up," Spike said.

"Some of us more than others," Xander muttered. "Captain Wrong-Way Peachfuzz here seems to have confused 'bring her back' with 'scare her off.'

Spike bristled. "Oh, sod off, Harris. Teleporting's not among my many talents. We'd better find her fast, though. Something nastier'n I am's got its hooks in her."

Tara ventured a timid interruption. "What happened to Mr. Tanner and the others?"

Xander glared, rubbing his temples. "They got away while I was helping Giles get you and Dawn into the SUV."

"Highly effective lot we are," Spike said with a derisive snort.

Xander honed his glare on the back of the vampire's skull for a few minutes, then accepted the lack of a direct attack as tacit truce. "Yeah. Finely tuned machine."

Buffy returned with more sandwiches, which she started passing around like rations. "So, to sum up--Willow may or may not be under the control of something yicky which may or may not be providing her with her nifty new powers, but she absolutely for sure involved Dawn in a way dangerous spell which almost killed her. This after yanking me back to life without a permission slip, and nearly dusting Spike in the process." Her lips thinned. "I think I need to have a little talk with Will."

Giles replaced his glasses. "Spike, perhaps you'd better fill Tara in on the details of your final encounter."

The vampire's jaw clenched. His eyes never left the pile of socks as he ran through a brief description of his conversation with Willow, or whatever was wearing Willow at the moment. Tara listened with mounting horror. "You... you mean your chip's not...?"

"Gone the way of the dodo," Spike said.

"And you almost killed Willow." Tara found she was shaking, alternating waves of fear and anger racking her shoulders. "My Willow."

Spike finally looked up, his eyes bleak as Arctic ice. "Yeh. That about covers it."

"So excuse me," Tara said, her voice cracking with the effort to hold it steady, "Can someone explain why all of you are so worried about what _Willow_ might do? OK, putting Dawn in that spell was bad. Really bad. But I _know_ she didn't mean for Dawn to get hurt!" She flung off the afghan and swayed to her feet. "Willow's got problems, but she's a good person! She cares about people! She wants to help them, she wants to fix things, and sometimes she goes too far--" A beseeching look at Buffy, who was sitting stone-faced on the couch, her folded arms a barrier across her heart. "She does bad things sometimes, but she's _ good!_ And Spike--I'm sorry, I like you, you've helped us a lot, but--but--you're not. Willow almost killed one person last night--you almost killed two. So--"

"You know, she's got a really good point there, Buff," Xander said. "We got any guarantee the Peroxide Wonder here isn't planning out the week's menu with us as the main course as we speak?"

The iron bars of no argument slammed down in Buffy's voice. "That's enough, both of you! In case it's escaped your notice, Spike's the one here, helping--"

Spike rose from the couch, all lithe black-clad grace: ..._black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera__ ..._ He faced her, a terrible demon indeed for all that his face was as human as her own. He reached up and stroked her trembling cheek, his nostrils dilating as he drank in her fear-drenched scent. His fingers were cool and dry. He smiled, and the expression managed to be horrifying and heartbreaking at the same time. "No, pet," he said, and though his eyes never left Tara's he was speaking only to Buffy. "She's right. Just like Will was right. Clever birds, the both of them."

And he was gone, just like that, between one breath and the next. "Spike!" Buffy cried. She grabbed an armful of afghan from the back of the couch and was gone too, almost as quickly, and Tara was falling backwards into the armchair and Giles's and Xander's arms, sobbing as if her heart had not already broken.

*****

Spike's motorcycle was still in the driveway, crouched in the shadow of the Cherokee, but he was nowhere in sight. Buffy ran down the front walk, her eyes going automatically to the oak tree where she'd so often caught him standing in the past, but there was no trace of him, not even a trampled cigarette butt in the grass. The last molten sliver of the sun was still visible above the horizon, but it would soon be gone, and the shadows were already plenty long enough for a vampire as indifferent to his own flammability as Spike was. Maybe she wouldn't need the afghan after all, but she wasn't taking any chances.

He couldn't have gotten far. The whole blurry-vampire-speed thing was only good for a block, tops. Had he taken to the sewers? Which way would he have gone--back to the crypt, or--? She didn't have to guess. Buffy closed her eyes and concentrated, and a thrill ran down her spine, out through every nerve and back again: not just _vampire nearby_ but _Spike, right there_, magnetic north to the lodestone of her soul.

She found him beneath an olive tree at the edge of the little park on Cavenaugh, lazing against the treetrunk with hands in pockets, his head tilted to meet the gnarled bole. He was still as only the dead can be still, an unliving shadow among the silver-grey sprays of olive leaves, and though he was standing in plain sight, eight people in ten would have walked right past him. A cigarette smouldered between his lips, half an inch of ash undisturbed at the tip. A thin tendril of smoke curled upwards to wreath his head like some infernal halo.

Half a dozen children were racing around on the other side of the park, playing some complicated game of tag through the monkey bars. Their distant shrieks of laughter cut the air like the cries of tropical birds, a sound far more exotic to Buffy's ears than the roars of demons or the wailing of the damned. Spike watched them across the straw-colored expanse of dead Bermuda grass, and a shudder ran over his body, ravenous yearning and revulsion entwined too closely to distinguish. He didn't move, didn't speak as Buffy approached, but she was certain that he sensed her presence as surely as she'd sensed his. After a moment one languid white hand rose to his mouth, and she saw his cheeks hollow and his chest expand as he took a drag on the cigarette.

"I could walk over there," he said very softly. "I could walk over there, and I could kill them all before the last one had time to scream. Not going to. But I could."

All her senses were focused on the tremor in his voice, the glitter in his eye, the tension in his every muscle--once more Spike was the only real thing in a universe of shadows. Buffy folded her arms across her chest and regarded him, unafraid, but... watchful. "Spike, haven't we had this conversation?"

He turned to look at her, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. "We will never stop having this conversation, Slayer." He peeled himself off the tree trunk and set off in an aimless zig-zag across the park, stalking along with his head down. Buffy followed, speeding up to keep pace with his longer stride. The few stars visible overhead were hard brilliant points of light, and the waning moon now rising over the rooftops to the east was still bright enough to paint long black shadows on the grass to vie with those drawn by the nearby streetlights.

"I keep thinking I've got the answer, you know?" Spike flung his cigarette at the nearest _Requiescat in Pace._ "And every bloody time I think I've got it pinned to the wall, the question gets more complicated. I didn't kill anyone last night! Supposed to be a good thing, right? What we're aiming for here, keep old Spike on the straight and narrow? But the Bit's looking at me like I'm something a dog wouldn't roll in, Glinda's set to give me a mystic bitchslapping, and let's not forget Xander 'Stake 'Em All And Let God Sort 'Em Out' Harris--"

They'd left the park behind and were walking along the berm next to an irrigation canal. A five-foot wrought-iron fence ran along the bottom of the embankment, and ranks of stately junipers marched off across the manicured grass beyond, dividing the rows of headstones--no elaborate carvings or monuments here, just discrete flat rectangles of bronze or polished granite. She didn't have the disguise spell on, but as long as they were out, they ought to make themselves useful. She tugged Spike after her and slid down the embankment, and a moment later they were over the fence and strolling through the cemetery, alert for movement, though chances were that Spike's continuing tirade would scare off anything with ears.

"Yeh, if it'd been anyone besides Will last night, there's a chance I'd've killed them!" The vampire aimed a wild sweep of his arm and a belligerent glare at the nearest juniper, daring it to make a move. "You know how that makes me feel? Like dog's dinner, that's what, because it would tear you and Dawn to shreds if I had! But part of me's screaming 'Only a chance? What happened to rock solid certain?' and another part's off blubbing in a corner because it _was_ Will and I almost _did_ kill her--" His voice held a rising note of panic. "There's nothing I do feels right anymore! I know I've buggered things up with Dawn, but I don't understand why! It was so simple with the chip. Didn't matter what I felt, what I want, try anything with a human and I'm flat on my arse with a migraine, and now I have to bloody _think_ about every sodding move I make!"

Spike strode over to the hummock of new turf which signified a recent grave, bent down and plunged a fist through the grass, halfway to his elbow into the soft earth below. He hauled the dazed fledgling who'd been in the process of clawing her way free up in a shower of damp clods. "I'm doing the best I bloody well can here!" Spike bellowed to the graveyard at large. "In fact, better! I've twisted my insides into a sodding pretzel, and it isn't good enough! Did it right, didn't I? Didn't do anything evil. Didn't kill either of 'em, and I wanted to--it's the wanting to, isn't it?" he snarled at the newborn vampire, who nodded her head in desperate agreement seconds before Spike ripped it off with a roar of frustration and tossed her disintegrating body aside like a rag doll. "Bloody buggering hell, I _can't_ change that!"

"Damn it, Spike!" someone said in an aggrieved whine. "That was our minion! It took us a year to find a good one!"

A matching pair of older vampires materialized from the shadow of the largest juniper, looking more nervous than menacing. They were dressed in a patchwork of worn shirts and out-at-the-knees jeans, and one of them was wearing a knit green wool cap that made him look like an undead Michael Nesmith. Buffy choked back a squeak of totally inappropriate laughter--it was the same timid, scruffy pair of vamps Spike had dragged her after last winter, on the ill-fated 'date' preceding the whole Drusilla-and-chains incident. Damn it, she should have sensed them. There were disadvantages to having Spike's electric presence thrumming through her system twenty-four seven; other vampires were starting to pale in comparison unless they were right on top of her--definitely not a position she wanted to encourage. Buffy whipped her stake out of her coat pocket and dropped into a fighting stance.

"Oh, fuck, it's the Slayer!" Scruffy #1 took to his heels, and after a gape-mouthed moment Scruffy #2 followed his example.

"Right, I've had about enough of you pair of limp-dicked would-be wankers!" Spike howled. "You're for it, the both of you!" He tore off after them.

Buffy beseeched the heavens for patience or the ability to fake it, and dashed after, the red and blue pinwheels on the afghan flapping behind her. The chase led into an older part of the cemetery--the Scruffy Twins were heading towards the moonlit limestone bulk of an open mausoleum. Buffy leaped over a tombstone, plunged her stake between Scruffy #1's shoulderblades, and spat out a mouthful of vamp dust in time to see Scruffy #2 dive for the marble lid of the sarcophagus in the center of the mausoleum. Spike grabbed him by the collar, yanked him back and slammed a fist into his jaw. The other vampire made a wild swing at Spike which Spike didn't even bother to block. Lips skinned back over his teeth in an insanely joyful grin, Spike delivered three swift vicious blows to Scruffy's gut, grabbed him by both ears as he doubled over, and bashed him face-first into the sarcophagus. There was a wet crunch; teeth flew and a spray of dark crimson splattered across the pristine marble. Scruffy slid bonelessly to the ground in a smear of blood and mucus, moans of pain bubbling out of his ruined mouth. Spike licked his lips and stepped back, breathing hard, to survey his work. He looked up at Buffy and smiled, a heavy-lidded look of satiety. "Now this," he purred, "this is more like. I don't bloody think. I bloody fight and fuck and feed and beat the shit out of things."

As he met her eyes and saw the shock on her face, the smile vanished, replaced with sick self-loathing, and all of a sudden Buffy knew with complete and equally sickening certainty exactly what was coming next. Lips compressed to near-invisibility, she walked up the mausoleum steps, knelt beside Scruffy and drove the stake into his heart, ignoring the sudden wrenching emptiness in her own. She stood and faced Spike, fists planted on hips. "Really," she said, then realized she was still clutching the afghan--the Linus Van Pelt vibe had to go. She tossed it away and smashed a hard right into Spike's nose with force enough to rock him back on his heels. "'Cause I think we can do better than that.

"OW!" Spike reeled back and clapped a hand to his nose. "What the bloody hell was that for?"

"Got your attention, didn't it?" Buffy danced back on her toes, crooking a finger in a come-hither gesture. "I'm just a little bit pissed off right now, Spikey. Just a tad." She lunged forward and Spike leaped to the top of the sarcophagus, staring at her all wide blue-eyed shock, as if she'd lost her mind. She leaped after him. Spike blocked the right to his jaw, dodged the left to his solar plexus and fell for the kick which swept his legs from under him. He fell on his ass, hard, and immediately kicked out to sweep her own feet out from under her. Buffy leapt over his shins. Spike jackknifed up in one of those flashy moves everyone thought was a vampire thing but was more likely attributable to those two hundred crunches a day, caught her ankles in mid-leap and flipped her backwards.

Buffy landed on her back, twisted sideways to avoid Spike's grab at her wrists, and was on her feet again with a roll. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a shape in the graveyard beyond, a vast half-translucent figure like the shadow of Ghede which had followed Tara before possessing her fully. The woman stretched, her dark limbs gaunt and muscular against the sky. She rose from her bed of bones, her hair a wild veil across her face--was it slashed across with white clay? Behind her a male figure strode out of the night, pale as death and bearing at his side a drum. His footfalls and the slap of his palm on the drum-head were the sounds of cities falling to ruin. The woman held aloft the severed head of a slain demon in her left hand, and in her right the knife which still dripped with its blood. She threw back her head and laughed, red tongue lolling from her sharp-toothed maw. The necklace of skulls which was all she wore rattled like dead leaves, and the smell of burning flesh was on the wind as she danced to the pounding beat of her ash-white consort's drum.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Slayer?" Spike yelled. He was on his feet again, skirting one of the corner columns of the mausoleum, and Buffy forgot the nebulous shapes in a fresh wave of fury. It was only another god sighting, and they never _did_ anything but hang around looking portentous, so who cared?

"What's wrong with _me?_" She feinted right and aimed a devastating wheel kick at his head. "Listen to yourself! Pot insulting kettle's color scheme much?" Spike rolled with the kick, blocked a follow-up punch and got a nasty jab to her stomach through her guard.

"Better talk to myself than you," he said between clenched teeth, "I'm the only one in this bleeding conversation making any sense!"

Buffy kicked him in the kneecap and dodged his two-handed blow to her jaw--not quite fast enough. She staggered backwards, faked a stumble, and flipped him head over heels. Spike dragged her down after him, slammed one size-9 Doc Marten into her belly and flung her halfway across the mausoleum. Buffy sprang to her feet, scarcely feeling the impact, and dove at Spike. He met her with an exultant snarl.

The fight developed a rhythm sensuous in its complexity, thrusting and blocking, striking and feinting. Buffy gave herself up to it. It was _good_ to be pushed this hard and fast, good to watch the yellow light flicker in his eyes as they circled, good to watch the bunch and slide of muscles in his arms and chest. Either Slayer's blood was some kind of vampire steroids, or she wasn't the only one who'd put on a little extra muscle in the last month, because when he landed a blow, damn, it hurt. And that was good too, in the weirdest possible way. Sick as it was, she'd missed this. It had been years since she'd fought him, really fought him, and she'd forgotten how swift and deadly he was, forgotten that the only thing better than fighting with Spike was fighting _with_ Spike, and the only thing better than fighting _with_ Spike was... OK, hadn't forgotten that part, but oh, that was lost forever now because--because--

Vast inhuman shapes, light and dark, danced behind them, slashing patterns of horrible beauty across the night sky. For a second they broke apart, panting, and the divine shadows which mimicked them did likewise. "Is this about anything in particular?" Spike asked. "Or have you just gone off your nut?"

"Like you don't know!" Buffy gasped. "I have this one by heart, Spike! I can sing all twelve verses from memory! 'It's too haaaaard! I can't do it without the chip, or with a curse, or when I'm not super-soldier!'" She vaulted over the sarcophagus and drove both bootheels solidly into Spike's midsection; he went down with a strangled 'Oof!' grabbed her calf and yanked her after him. "So which is it going to--ung!-- be, the 'Guess I'll go evil' speech or the 'I'm no good for you' speech? Or hey, why not combine both? Then you ride off into the stupid sunset on your stupid Harley for my own stupid good, and I h-hope it _fries_ you, you stupid, stupid... GUY!"

Spike caught Buffy's wrist, flipped her around, wrenched her arm up behind her back, and pinned her down on the lid of the sarcophagus, his whole weight thrown into keeping her off-balance. "Bloody right it's too hard," he hissed, and it was obvious he wasn't talking about life in general. "And for the mercy of Christ, it's not a Harley, it's a sodding Triumph Bonneville! Where'd you get the fuckwitted idea I'm going anywhere? Or giving up? What was the first thing Angelus told you about me, love?"

Buffy rammed an elbow into his gut and twisted free, glaring at him. "That once you started something, you..." She gulped, and Spike's whole expression softened at once into that terrifying killer's tenderness as he took in the pain in her eyes. If her churning insides were any indication, a similar merry-go-round of emotion was whirling across her own face. "...you don't stop until everything in your way is dead."

"Yeh, well..." His voice had gone husky. "He was right, if you replace 'dead' with 'sorted,' and add in 'unless he gets bored or something good comes on telly.'" They stood there, eyes locked, frozen in place. Spike's hands slid from her upper arm, over one breast and down her stomach, fingers brushing lightly over her aching nipple, sending little jolts of fire through her. Spike watched the progress of his hand with hungry eyes, the tip of his tongue running slowly along his upper teeth. Her whole body throbbed under his gaze. She could scarcely breathe. Spike licked the trickle of blood off his upper lip and grinned. He tapped her playfully on the shoulder. "Don't feature you boring me ever, and there's bugger all on Tuesday nights. Tag, pet, you're it."

And he was off again, laughing, shadow-boxing round behind her. He spun into her reach and threw a right to her jaw--playful, now. She blocked the blow and aimed a roundhouse kick at him. Spike absorbed the impact and launched himself at her again, barreling into her like a guided missile and slamming her up against the nearest column. Somewhere inside Good Buffy was carping that there wasn't time for this, that they should go home and make responsible Willow-finding plans. Good Buffy could stuff it.

She let her hands slide down his pectorals, mimicking his earlier caress, felt him take a deep, ragged breath as her thumbs swirled over his nipples and felt him let it go with a high-pitched whimper as her teeth closed on one firm little nub through the fabric of his shirt. There was a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead in the moonlight, but he wasn't at all hot after all that exertion. Holding him was like embracing a piece of the night made flesh. He kept on whimpering as her fingers undid his belt buckle and began working the zipper of his jeans, stroking their languorous way downwards. His cock thrust eagerly against her palm, yearning towards the wellspring of slick warmth between her thighs, pulsing--not to the beat of his silent heart, but her own. "How the heck do you manage to fight like this?" she asked, running a fingernail along the straining inseam of his jeans.

"Lots of practice," Spike gasped, fumbling with her zipper in turn. A shudder ran through him as his hand slipped into her jeans and caressed her warm flesh, and she realized his cheek was wet where it pressed against her neck, and not with sweat. "Love, I'll try till I'm dust, though it's you that makes me so, but I just can't care the way they want me to! I try. I try so hard. I look at some chit on the street and I think--I think 'There, she's Dawn's age, someone loves her like you do the Bit,' and it's all right in my head but there's nothing in my heart, nothing!"

Buffy ran the tip of her tongue along the acute angle of his cheekbone, tasting salt. "This is nothing?" she whispered. She kissed his eyelids, lipping tears from the long dark lashes--so unfair that lashes like that got issued to a man. "It doesn't taste like nothing. It doesn't feel like nothing."

"It's not enough!" he moaned, burying his face between her breasts. "Not enough for Niblet, not enough for Tara--how can it possibly be enough for you?"

When had what anyone besides her thought of him become something to agonize over, and should she be throwing a party? "I guess you know, then." Spike lifted swimming blue eyes to stare at her. "How you act. When they stop treating you like a man." She held his head in both hands, her fingers lost in the bleach-roughened curls, and let her own head fall to meet it, forehead pressed to forehead. She was dizzy, aching for him in every sense of the words, and far, far out of her depth. Words--Spike lived by words, great glorious piles of them. He needed words, and words were what she sucked at so very, very much. Couldn't she somehow make her hands and eyes speak for her, tell him what he needed to hear? Could he tell that the fact she was here, with him, and not with Xander and Tara, was an essay in itself? "Spike... you said once that I treated you like a man, but you're wrong--it would be an insult to treat you like a man. You work harder at being human than any man I know. I treat you like a vampire, a vampire who's...who's reaching for something. Something you shouldn't even be able to see, something most of the people who're supposed to have it take completely for granted. You make me see how precious being human is, Spike, every day, and I _need_ that to go on doing what I have to do. Even if you haven't touched it, even if you can't, I love that you keep reaching. I love you."

He laughed, a wild, awful, half-sobbing sound, and leaned forwards, winter-sky eyes devouring her. His hand was on her cheek, stroking it-- not with the impartial gentleness he'd used with Tara, but with feverish intensity; she could feel his fingers trembling. "Help me touch it, Buffy. Help me feel it. Make me feel it. Beat it into me if you have to! When I'm inside you I can almost touch it--make me--"

"I can't," she gasped, "I can't ever make you anything." His mouth was on hers, teeth scraping teeth with the ferocity of his kiss, tongues sliding past and twisting together in sleek velvet caresses as he drank warmth from her mouth like blood. She moaned as he slid in and out of game face, fangs pricking her lips like rose-thorns. Her fingers tore the buttons of his shirt free of their holes.

Marble beneath her, hard, cold, smooth, and dry. Bas-relief olive wreaths cut into her shoulderblades through the scratchy warmth of the afghan; fifty years of weathering blurred the once-sharp edges of the carvings. Spike above her, firm, cool, smoother, hair escaping in sweat-dampened ringlets from its comb-and-gel-imposed order. Even she was not strong enough to dig her fingers right into the stone, though she tried, she tried, as his fangs nipped at her collarbone and up the swan-curve of her throat, pinpricks of ice and fire. The lean hard length of his body was molded to hers, belly to belly, and she lay back, trying to wriggle out of jeans and underwear (and she'd thought ahead for once--pads, this time) without losing an inch of contact with his skin. She kicked the clothing free, and dipped her fingers between her own thighs. She brought them to his lips, glistening with milky fluid shot with crimson. "Think it's ripe?"

Spike's growl vibrated through her body so violently that she bucked and gasped and almost came without another touch. He sucked her fingers deep into his mouth, the wet-velvet-and-steel of his tongue swirling around the pad of each one, His hands were on her shoulders, her body bounded by the rock-solid pillars of his arms, hips flexing together in relentless rhythm. Starbursts went off inside her with every stroke, building to nova intensity--oh God, he had been made to fill her, she'd been made to enfold him. Before the afterimages could fade she was atop him with one quick lunge and roll, his narrow hips captured between her thighs. Tonight she was going to push that non-existant vampire refractory period to the limit.

She spread both hands gloatingly across the muscled expanse of his chest, raking her fingers across the sharply defined pectorals, down the sheer planes of his abdomen while he arched and shuddered beneath her. Her nails traced the sparse line of hair leading from his navel to the dark nest of curls below, eliciting ticklish shivers. He was slick and warm still from her heat and moisture, and she took him in one hand, stroking lightly, then with greater firmness, playing with the foreskin and the sensitive flesh beneath. His body came to life again immediately, swelling beneath her hand--so soft, so hard, satin over granite. His eyes held hers captive, so dark a blue they seemed black. "Thou art my life, my love, my heart,'" he breathed. "The very eyes of me; And hast command of every part, to live and die for thee...' Make me live, Buffy. Make me..."

"I can't make you anything," she repeated. "Except this." She bent and breathed on the head, her tongue flicking out to taste another kind of salt tears. Every slightest touch and movement of hers elicited some fascinating twitch or quiver from that beautiful pale body, some new expression of lust-drowned rapture on that expressive face. "I can make you come. All. Night. Long."

The wheel of the heavens turned above them, the earth groaned beneath them, and in the graveyard beyond, their dance was mirrored by the Black Mother, impaled in rapture upon the lingam of the Lord of Destruction. And in the labyrinth of passages deep below Sunnydale, Willow Rosenberg walked into an echoing cavern, took a deep breath, and announced to the assemblage of eyeless men, "OK. From now on, we're doing this my way."


	30. Chapter 30

The cavern was illuminated with rank upon rank of black candles, tall pillars and short squat votives crowded together on ledges, a great waxen pipe-organ with flames guttering low and sullen on each black and curling wick. Stalactites of drippings festooned the cavern walls. Willow watched a droplet of wax roll down the side of the nearest candle, slow, and freeze in the cool air. It smelled of licorice.

One of the eyeless men--the leader, Willow guessed, though they all looked identical--knelt before her, his bald leathery head bent in obsequious reverence. A dozen or so of his companions milled about at the opposite end of the cavern, having taken their fawning to a discreet distance after she'd singed a few burlap robes. Harbingers, they called themselves, and that name was naggingly familiar, but she couldn't exactly stroll into the Magic Box and play Research Girl right now. She'd made them fetch her a bench to sit on. It looked as if it had been ripped out of one of the old Initiative labs--there were bolt-holes in the bottoms of the legs and the slate-blue leatherette upholstery sported some fairly nasty-looking claw-marks on one end. Better than bare rock, though; if she was going to play Evil Overlord, there were going to be amenities. (She was pretty certain that her current situation was in blatant violation of Evil Overlord Rules #22, 50, and 54, but she had #29 down pat.)

"It's very simple," Willow said to the eyeless man. "You and your boss can't do diddly-squat without me. So let's ditch the cute little manipulation games, 'kay? Tell me exactly what the frilly heck is going on and maybe I'll just, you know, do something radical like help you. Not loving the mini-Armageddon concept." She avoided the creature's lack of eyes, her fingers picking at mildewy stuffing through the rents in the bench. "You're all pissy because I didn't kill Dawn and Spike didn't kill me and Buffy didn't kill Spike, but is any of that what you really _want_? No. What you want is to re-balance the Balance. Am I right?"

The Harbinger raised his mutilated head and did the staring-into-space thing that passed for looking at her. "What we want," he said in his dry grasshopper whisper, "is to overwhelm this entire plane in a firestorm of destruction, and enslave those we do not slay outright for an eternity of torment." A rictus which vaguely resembled a smile distorted his face for a second. "However, correcting the Balance is an acceptable short-term goal."

Willow swallowed. Never let them see you sweat, or stutter, or... even some of Spike's liquid courage would be nice right about now. "OK. So the problem is there are too many good guys running around. This can't just be happening because I brought Buffy back from the dead. There's been two Slayers ever since she died the first time."

Raven-harsh laughter rang in her ears. "No. It is not _just_ happening because you brought the Slayer back to a life she'd willingly renounced, but your rash actions in doing so precipitated the present situation nonetheless. Why do you think fate drew Daniel Tanner to you, to make you our agent? That, too, is balance." The laugh chopped off short and he struck the butt of his staff against the cavern floor, speaking a word that grated like the stone-on-stone scrape of an opening tomb. A many-leveled game board shimmered into being in front of her, Salvador Dali channeling Harry Potter. Pieces advanced, retreated, fought and died, and with every move the configuration of the board shifted around them, an ever-changing pattern of action, reaction and consequence.

"Even this is a simplification, but the Balance, you see, is not a simple see-saw," the eyeless man said. "One piece for every living and unliving creature in this world. Any one of whom can, at the right time, in the right place, make an immeasurable difference. But there are certain individuals who, by virtue of power or determination, are recognized as warriors for one side or another."

Willow gripped the edge of the bench and leaned forward, studying the pieces in fascination. There was Buffy, sword in hand, the white queen. Giles and a mini-Willow flanked her, clad in bishop's robes and bearing ancient tomes, and there was Xander carrying a knight's lance. Opposite them was the black king--the Master, with Darla as his queen and a court full of minions. A new figure entered the fray, black and white entwined: Angel and Angelus frozen in a terrible struggle, the man pinning the demon. The board shifted; Angel staked Darla and Buffy crushed the Master's bones. Another shift and Spike roared onto the board with Drusilla, a black knight in the service of a new dark queen. Angelus ascended the throne, the new black king, and Spike interfered with his queen's move to allow Buffy check and mate.

Willow watched as Faith threw aside her white sword for Mayor Wilkins's obsidian knife, and stood at his right hand. Angel departed for the far ends of the board. Maggie Walsh died at the hands of her own creation. Faith changed sides again, Anya peered out of a castle that looked suspiciously like the Magic Box, Dawn arrived out of nowhere, neither black nor white, but a brilliant green. With each move and countermove the board changed, the dark pit at its heart slowly becoming a level plane, and an ominous upthrust of squares, like the burgeoning of a newborn volcano, began to form in its center.

The eyeless man looked down upon the board, his slash of a mouth dragging lines of his wrinkled countenance down with it. "Historically the Slayer fights alone, but Buffy Summers has drawn others to battle at her side. It was for her sake that Angel rejoined the fight on the side of the Powers. It was through his intervention that Faith did likewise. There are not only two Slayers, but the side of Light commands the vampire with a soul, and controls the Key, which was never intended to take part in the great struggle at all. Further," the Harbinger's voice took on a tinge of disgust, "Buffy Summers has suborned one of the greatest dark warriors of our age."

Willow blinked down at the tiny figure of Spike rearing back on his motorcycle, a jet-black anomaly among the assemblage of white pieces, and didn't bother to suppress a snort. "Spike? Near brush with sharp pointy teeth here! I'd call him part of the solution, not part of the problem."

"You are alive, are you not?" the Harbinger said. "Therefore he is part of the problem." The tiny figure of Buffy fell to its death from a miniature tower, and the swelling in the center of the board ceased its expansion until mini-Willow pulled mini-Buffy through a glowing portal and into play once more. "Being what he is, he cannot change sides. The human soul is a mutable thing; a demon's essence is carved in diamond."

"But Angel--"

"Angelus did not change; he was subdued. William the Bloody is--" He clenched fleshless fingers into scarecrow fists, and hissed in tones of loathing, "--trying to do the right thing. Being what he is, his motives cannot but be selfish--he fights for good to sate his craving for battle, to gratify his vanity, to bring happiness to those he..." the loathing distilled into pure acid, "...loves." The eyeless man pronounced the last word as if it were poison and his lips would wither to speak it. "But still, he is trying. That in itself is... unprecedented. It shakes the foundations of the possible."

On the board, Spike saved Daniel Tanner from a pair of anonymous vampires, and the Hellmouth boiled up like a witch's cauldron. "That's _it?_" Willow slid off the bench and dropped to her knees beside the board. She picked up the tiny jet figure and turned it over in her fingers. Weird to think that Spike without a soul was a bigger problem than Angel with. "That's what messed everything up? It's all Spike's fault for slacking off on the homicidal mania?"

"No more or less than it is the fault of Buffy Summers's renewed existence on this plane. Either one is unbalancing. Together they threaten disaster."

"What if we just teleport one of them to Maui or something?"

The eyeless man managed to convey complete contempt without moving a single facial muscle. "Insufficient. They must either be removed from this plane, or enticed to our side. Else..."

The vision of Sunnydale as a blasted field of corpses flooded her senses once more, heat and crow-calls and the stench of rotting flesh. Willow gripped the game-piece tightly, its tiny sharp projections digging into her palm, and fought with her heaving stomach. "Your side."

"If you say so." The Harbinger's smile was edging into Hannibal Lecter territory. "The former would be simpler, the latter of more long-term benefit. To some extent the Balance is self-correcting. When it skews too far to one side, random factors combine to provide individuals with opportunities to act so as to increase the presence of whichever side is lacking. But the individuals presented with such opportunities must choose to take advantage of them."

Willow frowned. "Like Spike did when he helped Buffy defeat Angelus... or when he turned against Adam... or when he held out against Glory, or..." Spike, it seemed, was large with the answering when opportunity knocked. She was beginning to see why the Black Hats might be peeved with him--not exactly the most reliable of employees. The Harbinger nodded grimly and Willow narrowed her eyes. "Wait a minute. Losing my magic bringing Buffy back...that's one of these random factors, isn't it?"

The smile became an incongruously prissy smirk. "Your reputation for intelligence is well-deserved. And you, unlike your comrades, realize that maintaining the Balance is more important than petty hopes of victory for your side. Who, then, is the more virtuous?"

_Suck-up._ Still, in the midst of stomach-churning fear and guilt it was a comforting thought. Just because the eyeless guy was evil didn't mean he couldn't be right. Spike had gone against his home team three or four times and had ended up helping save the world each time--why couldn't she do the same? Unlike Spike, she wasn't running off half-cocked in a passion to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons. She'd thought this out. She was responsible for this mess; it was up to her to clean it up. She looked up at the Harbinger. "Removed from this plane, or converted, huh?" Willow closed her eyes and reached out for the cords of power binding her to the remnants of Tanner's band, reeling them in. Deep within her was the sound of satisfied laughter.

*****

Spike had never tackled brooding as an art--for one thing, Angel had staked out that emotional territory and guarded it with dog-in-the-manger ferocity for the last century, and for another, a proper brood required an attention span Spike didn't possess. A day or two of deep brown study, tops, and he'd be exploding with the twitchy compulsion to _do_ something. The closest he usually came was a sulk, preferably accompanied by getting good and smashed. Right now he regretted his lack of expertise.

They liked him. Tara'd said so, and Tara, of all people in the world, wouldn't lie. But they didn't trust him, not with the chip gone, not even Niblet. The knowledge was a gnawing ache in his gut, all the more painful for his inability to explain its presence. Buffy loved him. She lay draped atop him now, the afghan-wrapped chrysalis of some arts-and-crafts-minded moth, deep in untroubled sleep only inches away from the fangs which had come so close to meeting in Willow's tender neck. If that wasn't trust, what was? And shouldn't that have been enough, that Buffy trusted him with her life?

Except, of course, that he knew better than anyone that there were plenty of things Buffy held dearer than her own life. Her sister. Her friends. Her world. Her sodding duty, however weary of it she claimed to be. She'd entrusted him with Dawn once, and he'd failed her, and was bidding fair to do so again. His arms tightened fractionally around Buffy's shoulders and he timed his breathing to hers, drawing just enough air into his unresponsive lungs to fuel the low frustrated rumble in the depths of his chest. Each heartbeat marked a moment he'd never have with her again--each one to be seized and drained to the utmost. Holding her was a small slice of heaven, but...

...it wasn't enough.

_Not good enough. Not for her. Never good enough. Got to find a way to do better._

A sharp little elbow jabbed him in the ribs as Buffy stirred in her sleep, and the top of her head bumped against his chin. She'd been catnapping for an hour now, and he had no intention of waking her; she'd gotten less sleep last night than he had. Too late; a second later the chrysalis heaved, stretched, and split open. Buffy's tawny-blonde head emerged from the fuzzy blue and crimson folds, staring into the empty spaces of the night--kindred to the empty spaces behind her eyes. The windows of her soul had the shades drawn again. She looked down at him as if at a stranger, and the afghan bunched beneath her clenched fingers. Her nails bit crescents in his chest through the intricately knotted yarn.

"Am I here? Is this real?"

Her voice was a lost thing in the wilderness. God, for an enemy he could fight, something with spines and scales he could pound into jelly and know that it would never trouble her again! Nothing to do against this foe but endure, while emptiness mocked him through her eyes. He cupped her face in both palms and smoothed one hand across her forehead, pushing the tangled locks of hair away from her face. "Shh, love. It's real. You're real--were you dreaming? You're awake now, pretty pet..."

For a moment she remained frozen in his grip, and then, to his enormous relief, a hint of spring appeared in the winter grey of her eyes. Buffy melted against him as the thaw spread through the rest of her, wrapping her arms around his torso. "Sorry," she whispered. "Just one of those... spells."

"I know, love. I'm here."

"Sometimes I think they're what's real. That I'm still dead, or I was never alive at all and all this is--" She broke off, racked with a continuous shiver. He'd never thought of her as fragile, or someone to be protected in a physical sense, but she felt so small like this, clinging to him like a burr. "I keep thinking--if I could remember. If there was some connection between me now and and me then. Something to fill up the empty place. I'd know. I'd be sure I was real. But there's nothing."

_Your fault she's like this, you selfish tosser. Your soul that fetched her back._ Spike's teeth met in his lower lip, and the unsatisfying tang of his own blood flooded his mouth. Sodding guilt. He hated it; freakish, unnatural thing, what business had he feeling anything like it? In the last year it had infiltrated his mind and heart like an emotional bindweed, getting into everywhere it wasn't wanted. "Love," he whispered, miserable, "I'm..."

Her fingers on his lips silenced him. "Don't be," she said. "Not now. I want to be here. Believe that."

But she was still shaking, the shiver muted through the enveloping blanket. He tucked the afghan's folds around her shoulders, stroking her hair and crooning softly as if she were a nervous animal to be soothed. Gradually Buffy relaxed beneath his touch, the last of the tension easing out of her shoulders as she snuggled into his embrace. "I did dream something," she said, a frown drawing a pair of tiny lines between her brows. "You were in it. You, and Willow, and...something else. It was your birthday. There was a party. You were sitting at the head of the table, and you had a crown on, and Willow gave you a present. It was a beautiful box, all tied up with a big red bow, and when you opened it up there was this... this... this grail kind of thing, a golden cup."

A wave of deja vu washed over him. He'd heard those words, or something like them, before--long ago and far away. Something Dru had said, maybe, but he couldn't remember, and like much of what Dru said, it didn't make any more sense the second time around.

Buffy went on, "It shone and shone, and you picked it up to drink out of it... and I knew that whatever was in the cup was going to kill you. Burn you up." Her eyes sought his, haunted. "I tried to take it away from you, smash it, but you said you needed it--you were crying, oh, God, like your heart was going to break--" Her voice cracked. "And you raised the cup, and you drank, and you--you screamed, and there was light everywhere, and--and--you were gone."

Spike brushed his lips across her forehead, kissing away the worry-lines, and summoned up a century's worth of experience in the fine art of handling women prone to prophetic nightmares. "Ah, is that all, sweet? You got any idea how often I've set myself afire? Takes more than a little charring round the edges to do Spike in. You even sure this dream's one of the special Slayer jobbies, and not just come of fretting over your sis all day?"

An almost-smile flashed across Buffy's face and she scrubbed at her gritty eyes with her knuckles. "No, the nightmares about Dawn have a lot more whining for Kleenex and Seven-Up in them. It felt like a Slayer dream. But usually the Slayer dreams are more with the Cecil B. DeMille, not so much with the David Lynch. What time is it?"

Spike glanced at the sky and consulted his internal clock. "Getting on for ten."

Buffy struggled free of the afghan and sat up, stretching. Her nose wrinkled disdainfully at their general air of disheveled sticky mess. "We have _got_ to stop doing this in places with no running water."

"Sorry, pet. I can kick the head off a sprinkler if you like."

"Ooh, chivalry is not dead! C'mon, Grr-Kitty, let's go get cleaned up. The night is young and we have multiple asses to kick."

"Grr-_what?_"

"Don't blame me. Blondie Bear was taken."

Spike dropped the rumble an octave and growled, "Call me either one where anyone can hear you, chit, and I'll bloody well bite you."

Buffy's eyes glinted at him beneath lowered lashes, and ooh, yeah, there came the pouty lip, plump and pink and very, very biteable. "Threat or promise, Spikey?" She leaned over the side of the sarcophagus and began rummaging for her clothing. "We need to make the rounds and see if anyone's got goss on Willow. If she's pulled a Saruman on us she may be hiring orcs." Spike's eyebrow went up. "What?! I saw the movie! He's the... the other beardy guy." She paused, shirt in hand. "I don't even know how to feel about Willow right now. Mad, and worried, and did I say mad? I kind of hate asking Tara to..."

Spike laced his hands behind his head, licking the bitten place on his lower lip. "Yeh, not the most fun in the world, hunting down your nearest and dearest. Supposed to meet Clem at Willy's at eleven anyway; got business, and as of midnight Sunday last he owes me fifty quid. By the way, there's a Krallock demon in town we could do in any time we've a spare evening. Get me a fag while you're down there, love?"

Her reply was slightly muffled. "You don't need a cigarette."

Spike grinned. "Yeh? Came so hard that last time I thought my balls'd turned inside out. Believe me, pet, I need a ciggie." He could feel the heat rising in her; it was such a turn-on making her blush. For all her uninhibited verve between the sheets, Buffy liked to pretend a certain degree of innocence... or perhaps it wasn't pretend after all; part of her allure was the constant sense that he could astound her with her own body's capacity for pleasure. "Possibly three or four. Come on, world'll end at least six more times before you can expire of my second-hand smoke."

Buffy abandoned her search and flung herself across him, straddling his hips, and pinned his arms over his head. "Uh uh. It's my sacred Chosen One duty to fight evil, and smoking is evil. All those TV ads say so."

Spike regarded her for a second, catching his tongue-tip between his teeth, then twisted out from under her without warning and reached for his duster. Buffy dove after him, grabbed the other flap and managed to get a hand into one pocket. "Hah!" She waved the half-empty package of Marlboros triumphantly in the air, sending a few white cylinders flying gracefully into the night.

"Bloody hell, give that back! Do you know how much those things cost when you're not nicking 'em?"

Buffy stuck out her tongue, doing a little nyah-nyah lap-dance that set her breasts jiggling enticingly, and fuck if he wasn't packing wood again. She broke into a smug grin. "Make me."

"Grrrraarhh!" He lunged for her. Buffy ducked inside his reach. Her fingers were digging into his ribs, skittering up and down over every sensitive spot she'd discovered in the last week and a half, and Spike's growl metamorphosed into a shriek of laughter. "Bloody--YIII!! Buffy! No! Not that! Not there, oh Christ, fuck, YOW!" They flipped over the side of the sarcophagus and landed in a tangle of discarded clothes and afghan. Spike's teeth were just laying claim to one pert little breast when Buffy's purse rang from somewhere underneath the small of her back.

"Where'd it go, where'd--" Buffy flailed around for the cell with one hand, keeping the cigarettes at arm's length while Spike considered the delightful prospect before him. He gave the aureole a few preparatory circlings with the tip of his tongue and hummed as the delicate flesh crinkled beneath his touch. Buffy's eyes rolled back as she finally found the cell phone. "Hello? Tara? Yeah, I was just about to call you." She made furious get-off-me! gestures at Spike, who ignored her blithely.

"See, vampire here, love." He blew on the damp spot and turned his attention to the other breast, coaxing the nipple higher and harder, relishing the little involuntary jerks of her hips under his weight. "Got the world's biggest oral fixation--deprive me of my fags 'n I've got to suck on something..." Spike vamped out and caught her nipple between the points of his fangs, nipping and savaging with a rough relentless delicacy, until he could feel the blood pounding beneath the translucent skin. Reverting to human shape, he drew one sensitive little raspberry nub into his mouth with a growl, suckling avidly until the wild look in her eyes let him know it was time to switch off. With the cell in one hand and his smokes in the other Buffy was helpless to retaliate, and her every little wriggle and gasp went straight to his resurgent cock.

"Static?" Buffy squeaked. "No, that's Spike. Yes, I found him, and we had--a-ah!--long talk. He's, uh--oh!--looking for his cigarettes. Filthy, filthy habit. We were about to sally forth and--oooooh!--comb the underworld. But we can get his laundry off the couch first. Uh! Bye!"

Buffy dropped the cell phone, clasping the back of his head and pressing him closer, her fingers buried in his curls. A long wordless moan urged him to make a more thorough mouthful of her. The cigarettes fell from the nerveless fingers of her other hand, and Spike immediately snatched them, rocked back on his heels and stuck one into the corner of his mouth with a smirk. "Tsk, Slayer, lyin' down on the job? What happened to sallying forth to comb the underworld?"

Buffy glared, panting hard, then burst into giggles. Spike glanced down at himself; Little Spike was bobbing enthusiastically against his belly, desperate for more attention. Buffy rolled over, hiccuping with laughter, and shimmied across the pile of clothes to give it to him. "Isn't smoking supposed to _stunt_ your growth?"

Once Buffy's expert assistance rendered him once more capable of zipping up his jeans in comfort, Spike lay in lazy repletion, chin on hand, and watched her dress. She sat on the side of the sarcophagus with her shirt half-buttoned, the modest swell of her breasts visible over the abbreviated lace of her bra--she was small and firm enough to go without if she wanted, but that flash of the forbidden always made his heart yearn to race, so he was glad she sometimes didn't want. Her hands moved in sure, graceful arcs, combing out her hair. A hundred strokes, he thought; lucky brush, in such intimate daily contact with that cascade of spun sunlight. He loved her hair, the sheen and bounce of gold silk above and the musky tangle of chestnut curls below; all that's best of dark and bright indeed, and who was he to sneer at unnatural blondes?

He ran a toe along her bare ankle and Buffy looked down at him for one moment of perfect radiant content, and then trouble entered her eyes once more. "Is it always going to be like this? I mean, eventually do we get to the point where we can touch each other without precipitating an exchange of bodily fluids?"

Silly question. He'd be wanting her when she was wrinkled and grey--stake him now and his restless dust would follow whatever wind stirred her clothing. "'Spect eventually we'll wear each other out and be reduced to one or two shags a day like everyone else."

"I guess. This, with us, totally refuses to suck. And I feel skeezy enjoying myself even a little when Tara's home worried sick and Willow's... wherever, doing whatever."

Ah, yes, the Summers guilt complex reared its annoying yet endearing head. "I'm worried about Red too, love, but since we weren't planning on hunting her tonight I can't see we've set the schedule back any."

Buffy looked at him, curious, and though he wasn't sure what he'd said to prompt it, she smiled, one of those glorious light-up-the-room smiles he'd happily endure a week-long John Tesh concert to see. She stuffed the brush back in her purse, buttoned her blouse up and slipped her kicky little suede ankle boots back on--where the hell had she gotten those? Sometimes he suspected Dawn wasn't the only light-fingered one in the family. "It's funny. The first time we ever kissed, that time Willow messed up that spell...the moment we touched, nothing else mattered. I was sure it was the spell. But it keeps happening. Now I get to worry that it's because of whatever freakazoid demony secrets are lurking in my sordid Slayer past."

Spike allowed himself a nostalgic moment: Memories of their torrid clinch while the battle with the Chumash spirits raged around them had provided him with wanking material for the next year. He sat up and began pulling on his boots. "What of it if it is? Say you've a vamp fetish, say I've a Slayer fetish--good on us. Bloody brilliant luck for the both of us we met."

Buffy shook her head. "You know, I've got to stop listening to you. If I do it long enough, you start to make sense."

*****

The Zagros demon in the purple knee brace was leaving the bar as the motorcycle roared into the parking lot. It snuffed the air as they pulled up, and shuffled hurriedly out of their way as Spike swung Buffy off the seat. Buffy watched it limp off across the unusually-full parking lot, eyes narrowed. "Scales the exact same color as the Bridesmaids' Dresses From Hell, I swear!" she muttered under her breath, her haunted expression segueing into a fresh pout at Spike's chuckle. "Oh, sure, you can laugh--all you have to do is show up in something black. What a sacrifice."

"Innit, though? Just goes to show what an altruistic bloke I am. 'Course I also have to be polite to Harris. Bad form to eat the groom on his wedding day." Spike offered her his arm; she took it, and he matched her quick glowing smile--a week and a half of shagging each other senseless in every position two exceptionally athletic and limber people could manage, and this simple public touch still lit him up like an electric torch. He didn't have to put on a show of swagger as they strode up to the front door; he was escorting his lady and for that reason alone he was king of the world.

The noise hit him the minute they stepped inside--the jukebox was blaring "This Kiss" over the din of a few dozen shouted conversations in half as many languages. On a normal Tuesday night, Willy's place boasted half a dozen customers, lurking in the corner booths or holding up the bar, but tonight every booth and table was packed, and part of the crowd had spilled over into the normally closed-off storerooms in the back of the building, much to the disgruntlement of the kitten poker crowd. Spike scanned the crowd for Clem, but the Sharpesi demon was nowhere to be seen. The crowd wasn't the usual mix of vampires, demons, and a few down-and-out humans looking to score a suck job or just too fried to care who they drank with, either. The percentage of the weird and unusual had gone way up. A pair of Serevus demons, (obviously from out of town, judging by their matching I VISITED THE HELLMOUTH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT attire) were posing beside the jukebox, their leathery wings poking through slits in the back of the shirts and fanning the smoky air. The tall, thin, bile-colored demon Spike recalled from their last visit was squinting at the Serevi through the viewfinder of a cheap 35mm camera and urging them "Closer! The wings are still cut off!" The looks of wariness, fear and just plain huh? at the sight of him at the Slayer's side, instead of a respectful three paces behind, were still pure gold. Word of Buffy's break with the Council was all over town by now, but no one was quite sure what it meant.

Willy was swiping a rag around a glass behind the bar, with the effect of redistributing the smudges in new and interesting patterns. He looked up as they approached, the tip of his long thin nose twitching. "Hey, Slayer," he said, guarded. "Or is it just Miz Summers now that you're a free agent again?"

"It's always Slayer to you, Willy," Buffy replied, leaning against the bar. Spike settled into a hipshot slouch behind her, arms folded across his chest. "Busy," she said, as the vampires on either side of her grabbed their drinks and abandoned their stools. "What is this, triple coupon night?"

Willy shrugged. "Bad stuff in the downbelow, Slayer. Or good stuff. Either way, the Hellmouth's not real reliable-like these days, and it's messin' up a lot of prime real estate. You need a place to crash for the day, Spike, I'm rentin' out the storeroom. Only fifty bucks a day, and cheap at the price."

"That would be the storeroom with the windows that let in the nice sunbeams around tennish?" Spike asked. "Grand-dad didn't recommend the view."

"Suit yourself. What can I do you for? Got a nice fresh shipment of--"

"We need some information," Buffy interrupted. "Willow Rosenberg. She disappeared Monday night, and we think she's gotten into something over her head. Have you heard anything--"

"Yeah, well, my memory ain't none too good since that no-good skunk messed with my mind." Willy set the glass down and picked up another one. Spike observed with interest that the one he'd set down was now actually dirtier than the one he was cleaning. "Not to mention the recent unpleasantness with the Hellmouth. All these folks on the move, it's easy to miss one girl." At Buffy's hard-edged look, he added hastily, "I'll tell ya anything I know, Slayer, you don't have to bust up the place. But things is kinda hazy these days. I'm just sayin'."

The corners of Buffy's mouth went pinched, and her hand started to travel towards her purse. Willy was fishing for a bribe, but considering the current strained state of the Summers financial empire, Spike was fairly sure she didn't have enough to make The Snitch pony up, and he wasn't inclined to part with any more of his own hard-earned dosh than absolutely necessary. "This shouldn't strain even your limited mental capacity, mate," Spike said. "Wiccan bird--red hair, green eyes, so tall, yen for the ladies? Seen hide nor hair of her, or not?"

Willy smirked. "You're asking me?" He threw a conspiratorial look at Buffy. "Last time the witch went missing, Chip Boy here--urk!" Glassware went flying and the bartender's legs spasmed in a frog-kick as Spike heaved him over the bar. Spike cocked his head and smiled, very deliberately letting the man watch his face distort and his canines lengthen and sharpen. The room went silent, as if someone'd flipped the mute button on the whole chattering lot of them, and every head swivelled to the tableau beside the bar, taking in the fact of Spike holding Willy at arm's length a foot above the floor and not collapsing in agony.

"You might think," Spike said pleasantly, "That this trick's working 'cause I'm not meaning to hurt you. Could just be I'm just holding you here for the Slayer to whale on, not that either of us'd do something that uncivilized--oh, wait." He drove his other fist into Willy's gut while Buffy watched with critical detachment--not hard; barely a love-tap by vampire standards, but Willy gave vent to a very gratifying 'oof!' "Yes, we would."

"Spike, he can't tell us everything he knows with a crushed windpipe. Let him down." Spike let go immediately and Willy dropped, staggered, and narrowly averted a fall by grabbing the bar. Buffy pushed that delectable lower lip out. "Besides, I'm not having any fun. Next time I get to be the bad cop."

Spike stepped back with an elaborate bow. "Deepest apologies, pet. Ladies first."

Buffy shot him a flirtatious smile and rounded on Willy, grabbing the bartender by the lapels. She wasn't tall enough to hold him off the floor, but she got her point across. "So?"

Willy rubbed his throat, and jerked his head in Spike's direction. His protuberant eyes were showing a greater than usual amount of white around the edges. "So he's...uh..."

"Are we talking about Spike?" Buffy inquired, giving him a shake. "I don't remember us talking about Spike."

"Look, honest, Slayer, I don't know! It's like a Rwandan refugee camp down there. Your Willow could be anywhere--but..." He hesitated, and continued in a lower voice, "May not mean anything, but the first folks to start moving, a couple of weeks ago, before all this got so bad? They weren't movin' away from the Hellmouth. They were kiting out of the section of the caves closer to where those Army guys were set up a few years back. If your pal's involved with something, it may be setting up shop there."

Buffy let Willy go and exchanged a look with Spike while Willy made a hasty retreat to the relative safety of the area behind the bar. Neither of them had any very fond memories of that particular area of Sunnydale Underground. Spike pulled a twenty out of his pocket and slapped it down on the bar. "Right, then. Clem comes in, we're at the table over there. O-neg and Guinness, make sure it's the hospital stuff, and don't think I can't taste the difference. You want anything, pet? I'm still flush with nice clean eyeball money."

"Diet Coke." She eyed the glasses on the counter. "In the can, please. And I could go for some nachos."

"You heard the Slayer." Spike lapsed back into human shape and gave Willy his most charming and predatory smile. "Keep the change."

They headed for the table, loaded down with drinks and Willy's Kitten Surprise nachos. Willy's limited menu was sadly devoid of blooming onions, and Spike wondered exactly how high on the evil meter breaking a few of the owner's fingers until he agreed to feature it would register. Probably fairly high, going by the glowing sense of anticipation the thought of doing it produced. Maybe he could just threaten finger breakage; contemplating that only gave him a small happy.

Spike set his blood and Guinness down, delivered Buffy her Coke, pulled out a chair for her and slouched comfortably down on his tailbone. Buffy perched on the edge of her seat and picked up a nacho, nibbling on the edge. "We can recon the caves--" she yawned. "Tomorrow, I guess. Maybe Tara will be able to narrow it down to, oh, only fifty or sixty miles of tunnel by then." She looked at the nachos, then down at herself, eyes large with sudden doubt. "You'd tell me if I was getting fat, right?"

That made it official; he was absolutely, positively The Boyfriend-- bizarre changes of subject and the most dreaded question a woman could ask a man all wrapped up in one. "Is there any answer to that which won't get me staked? 'Love, hate to tell you, but you're in grave danger of ballooning up to a size two?'"

She smacked his arm. "I'm serious! I've been eating like a horse lately. Do these pants look tighter to you?"

Spike favored her with a lascivious grin. "Yeh, and the strange thing is, seein' you in 'em always makes my trousers tighter, too. Think it's psychological?"

Buffy rolled her eyes. "You like getting slapped around, don't you?"

"Depends on who's doing the slapping." He waggled an eyebrow at her. "Still got those manacles under the bed, you know."

"And once more, we enter into 'ew' territory. Like I'd ever let you chain me up again."

"Thinking more of letting you chain me up."

She snorted, but there was a gleam of--anticipation? curiosity?--in her eyes. Make a note of that one for the one-month anniversary. Buffy scooched her chair over, leaned into his side and gave his biceps a squeeze as he slipped an arm around her shoulders. "You're a big ol' pervert, and if you ever tell anyone I even thought about it the world will find out that you purr when I scratch your lumpies. Hey, there's Clem."

"I do not--oh, you're thinking about it, then?" Spike sat up and waved Clem over, and the bile-colored demon's flash went off right in front of them, a hot needle in his light-sensitive eyes. "Watch it, wanker!" He was half-way into game face, blinking white and violet splotches from his vision and lunging over the table when Buffy caught him by the collar and yanked him back to his seat.

"Chill, Spike. Save it for the nasties."

"Sorry, sorry, sorry!" the creature babbled, its pale bulging eyes darting back and forth between them. "Finger slipped, wrong button, there's no film in it, please don't--" Wrapping the camera in batrachian fingers and clutching it to its boney chest, the demon backed off--a gratifying change from their last encounter, to be sure. A that moment Clem bustled up with a pleased grin, his skin-flaps wobbling, and the would-be photojournalist made its escape.

Clem beamed at him. "Hey, Spike! You're looking good. For a dead guy, anyway. Here's that list you wanted. There's only five of them so far, but once people start seeing that you can come through I think-- oh, my." He gaped at Buffy. "You really _are_ going out with the Slayer? Who was that guy?"

"Dunno. Some arsewipe who picked a fight with us a couple of weeks ago, and now apparently wants an autographed photo." Spike perused the list: five names, five potential customers. In time, he hoped, they'd be seeking him out through Anya's advertising, but right now he needed a jump-start, and a little industrial espionage--er, word of mouth never hurt anyone. "Been dealing with Teeth, this lot?"

Clem snagged a chair from the next table and plopped himself down. Buffy waved him towards the nachos and the demon grabbed a handful and crunched them down. "Yeah. Except for that last guy; he's been going to Rack."

Buffy frowned. "Should I know these people?"

"Yeh, you should," Spike replied. "But you don't, so listen and learn."

Buffy smiled very sweetly at Clem and kicked Spike in the shins. "Spike and I are--hey! That's not why he owes you fifty dollars, is it?" She turned on Spike with an outraged glare. "Were you making bets with him over whether or not I'd go out with you?"

In hindsight, that was when it all began to go pear-shaped. "I bloody well was not!" Spike retorted, indignant. "That would be--" Ungentlemanly was the word that leapt to mind, but would blow his badass reputation completely.

Clem held up a conciliatory paw. "Oh, no, nothing like that! It was just a little wager on that Krallock demon that blew in from Seattle. Some of us--us demons, you know--didn't believe you'd really stopped working for the Council, so I bet Spike you'd kill it before Sunday night. But you didn't, so--" He fished a wad of crumpled bills out of the folds of his tunic and handed them over to Spike with a cheerful, saw- toothed smile. Spike took them with a sense of dread; something was about to go terribly wrong. "Krallock demon?" Buffy asked, her eyes sharp as throwing daggers. "The one you just told me about tonight?"

_Oh, buggering hell, this can't be good._ Spike became extremely interested in the foam on his beer. "Uh... yeh. Since you're not working for the Council anymore," he cleared his throat significantly to remind her that Clem was right there with his great flaps of ears twitching like weathervanes, "didn't figure you'd need to know from me." He ran a finger around the mouth of his glass and licked beer suds off it.

Buffy grew ominously quiet. "Even if I'm not working for the Council any longer," she said, "don't you think I might need to know about the big boys in town?" There was a tightness in her voice he couldn't quite analyze. "After all, Krallock demon... I'm not the big expert you or Giles or Anya is, but aren't they on the large and vicious side?"

Clem nodded vigorously. "They sure are! Why, when it showed up for poker night last week--this was after you took off for L.A., Spike--it bit Ralphie's head clean off after he bluffed it into folding on a straight when all Ralphie had was a pair of fours." Clem shook his head ruefully. "Man, that Krallock sure doesn't like vampires! Dust everywhere. We were sweeping Ralphie out of the furniture for hours."

"Gathering I needn't to go into mourning for Ralphie." Buffy's tone didn't lighten any. "But let me get this straight, Spike. You kept from me the fact that there was a dangerous new demon in town--a demon that for all I know has been snacking on sweet little old ladies and their poodles every night for the last week--so that you could win a fifty dollar bet?"

Spike squirmed. "Well, yeh." He was getting all defensive and bothered, and wasn't sure why. This was demon business pure and simple, and done in defense of her little scheme, too. Mostly. "Don't know what your knickers are in a twist about. All I bet on was you wouldn't kill it by Sunday, 'cause of, you know; whether you knew it was in town to begin with never came up. Never suggested to 'em you knew it was there. 'S not cheating--much, anyway."

Buffy had drawn away from him and was sitting up very straight, looking at him with huge wounded eyes, and Spike frantically reviewed the last several minutes of conversation, trying to figure out what was wrong. Krallock demons, large, dangerous, poodle snacking, little old ladies, not cheating, much... _Oh bloody buggering fuck._

It was the little things that got him.

Hadn't he used up his quota of irony yet? Nobly turn aside from warm-blooded murder and trip up on a stupid sodding sin of omission. Not a little thing to her, though, those hypothetical old ladies. "Harris and I were going to take it out Sunday night," he said, painfully aware of how feeble he sounded. "We just got distracted by the Hellmouth going arse-up on us. And it's not as if we've had time to hunt the bloody thing anyway! In fact--"

"That's not the point! You kept something from me that affects my job--my real job, not whatever I end up doing to pay the bills." Buffy drew a deep, dejected breath and let it out. "And people could have gotten killed. Maybe they have."

She wasn't even angry, and that was the worst part of watching the walls that had recently been breached between them slamming up again behind her eyes. She was just... resigned. As if she didn't--as if she _couldn't_ expect better of him. _ This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang... _ Spike sat there, gripping his glass, eyes glued to the scarred tabletop as Buffy rose to her feet and slung her purse over her shoulder. _Get mad at me, love. Flay me up one side and down the other. Hit me, threaten me with stakes, do something, say something. Angry means we've got a chance, angry means you think I could've done better..._

"I'm tired, Spike," she said. "I'm going home."

He looked up, met her eyes, his own all anguished desperation; she turned her head aside, as if from the sight of some terrible wound. "Buffy, look, I cocked up--"

"Yes, you did." She was going to leave him his pride, for all it was worth; no stomping out, no public humiliation. Small favors. Buffy bent over and dropped a chaste kiss on his forehead, and when she straightened her eyes were bright with emotion, fathomless pools fringed with jet. "I love you," she whispered, fingertips so very gentle along the side of his face, the line of his jaw. "I do. I will always..." Her voice cracked in two, shattered into shards so painful he could see her throat closing in agony around them, and how could he soothe away pain he'd caused? "But this is one of the times it's very, very hard."

The room was spinning, and Spike squeezed his eyes closed to shut out the sight of the hurt in hers, and found himself dragging in huge harsh lungfuls of breath. As wounds made by words go, not so deep as the grave nor wide as a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve...

She was gone when he opened his eyes, and Clem was shaking his shoulder. "Spike! Hey! Spike, are you OK?"

Spike gave one short bitter bark of laughter. "Yeh. 'M okay. Just okay."

*****

_ He was sitting in Buffy's living room. He wasn't exactly sure why; everyone else had gone home or to bed. "You can get the phone, can't you, Giles?" Buffy asked as she waltzed out the door._

_"Of course," he answered, though he was really quite tired. She tossed her hair and smiled at him, and he didn't have the heart to complain. The phone rang the moment the door closed behind her._

_"Is Dawn there?" Breathless, giggly girl-voices; Lisa, Megan, Janice, who could tell them apart? "She skipped school and giant snakes ate the cafeteria, and only the Key can fix it."_

_"She's indisposed," he said, but the other line was ringing._

_"Hello, it's just me!" Clem, cheerful and faintly apologetic. "I need to get this stuff to Spike." The demon's wrinkled paw emerged from the receiver, holding a bouquet of squirming eyeballs. "Can you take a message?"_

_"I think it might be better if--"_

_Rrrring! "Mr. Giles? Have you seen my daughter? I have to tell you, if you've let Willow go off to destroy the world on her own I'll be forced to report you to MOO. I didn't sign her permission slip."_

_He was juggling three or four receivers now. "Giles!" Buffy chirped through one of them. "I found Spike, and it's OK--he made me a vampire, and we're going to get married and live happily ever after, except not so much with the living. Giles? Giles? Are you there, Giles?"_

Giles woke, his heart pounding, and lay there for a moment, clutching his pillow and coming to the groggy realization that the shrill insistent ringing in his ear was coming from the telephone downstairs and not the remnants of his dream. He groped for his glasses on the bedside table, crawled out of bed and staggered downstairs, barking his shin against a box full of books. He swore bitterly, and grabbed the receiver, expecting news of Willow, erupting Hellmouths, or gods on parade.

What he got was Quentin Travers. "Rupert, are you mad?"

Giles slumped against the breakfast bar, putting one of the leaning towers of books in grave danger of toppling, and squinted across the darkened living room at the time on the VCR. "Very possibly." He'd gotten home past midnight, stared at the pile of notes and journals on the kitchen table for a moment, and very deliberately turned his back on the whole mess and gone upstairs to bed. He ran a hand through his hair. "Quentin, it's three in the bloody morning over here, and I have a beast of a headache. Can't this wait?"

"How long have you known that Buffy Summers has been... _involved_..." Travers invested the word with such concentrated bile that Giles was surprised the phone lines didn't corrode, "with a vampire?"

Damn. Giles picked up the phone and sat down on the couch. "Involved? Are you referring to Angel?" he asked, schooling his voice to blankness.

"You know precisely to whom I am referring. In the last several weeks our local sources have been claiming that Buffy Summers is carrying on a public affair with William the Bloody and that you are not only aware of the situation, you condone it. At first I dismissed it as unfounded rumor, but within the last hour I've received a copy of a photograph of the two of them in a... compromising position, and I can no longer ignore the matter. We've had our differences, Rupert, I won't pretend we haven't, but all your past betrayals of the Council have been in the name of a misguided devotion to your Slayer. But this..." Travers sounded genuinely grieved.

"Is still in the name of that misguided devotion," Giles replied coldly. Why couldn't he be having this conversation at nine A.M. after a strong cup of Earl Grey? Travers knew exactly what time it was in Sunnydale, he had no doubt. "In my considered judgement, Buffy's association with Spike is doing her more good than harm at the moment. Should that perception ever reverse itself, I am more than prepared to take the appropriate steps to end it."

There was a hissing silence on the other end of the line. "I'd hoped that your researches would have borne more fruit by now. It would make explaining the situation less... traumatic. There are reasons--"

"The extreme likelihood that the Slayer's powers have a demonic origin of some sort? Yes, I deduced that some time ago, Travers." Giles suppressed an urge to smugness; Travers would only trip him up with it if he gave in to overconfidence now. "I fail to see its bearing on the current situation."

Spluttering. "You fail--? Good Lord, Rupert, what do you think's driving her to this unhallowed liaison? We've seen it happen again and again--the power grows with age and use, and if it's not channeled correctly, disaster! The Slayer who gives in to her baser urges and engages in this... this miscegenation, invariably destroys herself."

"Odd." Giles fought down a flare of anger. "My research indicated that a number of them were destroyed by the Council."

"All Slayers die sooner or later. The point is, they can die in battle for us, or against us. Buffy Summers has been teetering on the edge of rogue status for years--"

"No, Travers," Giles hissed, his hand tightening on the receiver. "That's not the point. I've seen Buffy die twice. Until you can say likewise of a Slayer you've Watched, don't presume to tell me what the point is. She will die. But she can die whole, as a warrior, fighting for people she loves and a cause she believes in, or she can die broken, with despair chipping piece after piece of her soul away long before her body ceases to breathe." He realized he was shaking with anger, and took a deep breath, calming himself. "I don't pretend to understand why Spike is necessary to her. I do not approve of Spike taking the place he has in Buffy's life. But so long as he poses no danger to Buffy or the others, it is not my place to approve or disapprove."

He waited tensely for the response to that. Did the Council's unknown informant know of the chip's deactivation? If so, that would narrow the field considerably, give him some idea who was peaching on them. Travers sighed. "The Council does not react well to extortion, Rupert. This... work stoppage of hers is the second time Miss Summers has resorted to it to gain her way with us, and in light of this new information we will not--no, we cannot stand for it. A desire to provide for her sister is one thing. Shirking her duties in order to..._ cavort_ with a demon, the very creature it is her sacred duty to eliminate from the world--that, sir, is a very different matter.

"Because of our past friendship, Rupert, I'm giving you a chance I'd give no one else--a chance to do your duty. Buffy Summers has gone through a tremendous amount of trauma in the past year, quite aside from her return from the dead, enough to push the stablest person to the edge. She needs help. Help we can give her."

Giles closed his eyes and leaned back against the couch cushions. "Indeed. Your concern for her welfare touches me, Travers. Do go on."

An eager note slipped into Travers's smooth dry voice. "I can have a Council team in Sunnydale within forty-eight hours. Counselors, parapsychologists, and so forth to examine and develop a treatment program for Miss Summers, and a few of the more...physical types to deal with the vampire. The creature's still cooperating with you, I presume; as it's unable to attack humans it should be easy enough for you to capture and restrain it."

They didn't yet know about Spike's unleashing, then, though Giles couldn't imagine Spike keeping it a secret for long. "Mmm, yes, so it should. Considering that our last several personal encounters with Council representatives have left me inclined to trust you only slightly more than a soulless creature of evil, perhaps you should explain to me why I should want to?"

The question seemed to floor Travers. "Rupert, why do you think the Council exists? Why do Slayers have Watchers? To record their triumphs and failures to be sure, but first and foremost to guard against just what is happening now. To channel their abilities into a form which will aid humanity." His tone was deadly serious. "You've faced a rogue Slayer. And Faith was half-trained, undisciplined, sabotaged by her own passions. Do you really want to face another one, this time a Slayer who is, as you've pointed out yourself, the most experienced and determined of her kind for a century? Allied, moreover, with one of the most vicious and deadly vampires the line of Aurelius has produced? It is your sworn duty to protect the world--with her, but also, if need be, from her, should Buffy Summers decide to throw her lot in with the demonic strain of her heritage." Travers cleared his throat. "And on a more mundane level, if you aid us in containing the vampire for study and in gaining us access to Miss Summers, I'm prepared to accede to Miss Summers's demands for a salary."

"I see." Giles sat silent for awhile, watching the shadows of branches move across the drawn curtains. Travers's offer deserved half-serious consideration, if only because Spike was, after all, a vampire, and potentially dangerous for that reason alone. Still, Spike was a vampire who had saved his life once, however self-serving his reasons had been, and while Giles would have had no qualms about sending Spike to a dusty death should it prove necessary, turning him over for vivisection seemed... tacky. And there was a more important factor as well. "Quentin... regardless of my opinions of Buffy's personal life, I will not lie to her on your account again for any price. I'm afraid I couldn't possibly accommodate you without discussing the matter with her first, and I think we both know what her response would be."

"Ah." It was rather chilling that Travers sounded perfectly calm, as if this had been the answer he'd been expecting all along--well, it may have been. "Then it is with very great regret that I must inform you that your association, and that of Buffy Summers, with the Council of Watchers, is over."

"Haven't we gone through this before, Travers? Without a Slayer, what do you intend to--"

He could hear the frosty smile all the way across the globe. "That, Rupert, is no longer any of your concern." And the line went dead.


	31. Necessary Evils by Barb C

The sidewalk was strung with luminescent pearls of lamplight, knotted in place by shadow. Night's stage-curtain had fallen, lending the street a mystery and romance that day denied it. A car cruised past, engine shaking with the automotive death-rattle of a loose piston, and for an instant its headlights tore the backdrop of darkness asunder and bared the to view the rust-streaked, corrugated metal flanks of warehouses, and the battered chain-link fences fringed with gone-to-seed foxtails, crushed soda cups and cigarette butts. And one slim blonde girl, whose self-contained gaze forbade questions as to what she was doing walking alone in such a place, at such a time: _Move on, mister. You don't want to know._

Buffy watched as the car turned a corner and darkness swallowed it, engine-rattle, tire-hum and all. For the first few blocks she'd half-expected Spike to roar up on his bike and either pick a fight or try to make up, but she'd walked far enough now that that seemed unlikely. Her footsteps were the only sound in the world. Maybe he and Clem had business which didn't (gasp, horrors) concern her, or maybe he'd decided to relieve his feelings by picking a fight with someone else. _And we're homesteading in Psycho-Buffy Territory when the idea of someone else fighting Spike makes you jealous._

Buffy trailed her hand along the fence surrounding the Sunnydale Tool &amp; Die workyard, her fingertips gradually going numb with bouncing against the links. Had she done the right thing, walking out on Spike like that? There was no handy dandy _ Vampires Are From Mars, Humans Are From Venus_ or _Slayers Who Love Vampires Who Love Slayers Too Much_ for her to consult, and she was scraping the bottom of the introspection barrel with a spoon. Should she have chewed him out? Given him a pat on the head and assured him that compared to not ripping Willow's throat out, this was minor league? But it wasn't. Even she, Research Avoidance Girl, knew that Krallock demons were dangerous, because... her fingers hooked in the aluminum mesh, bringing her up short. Because Spike had told her so, on Sunday night. And she, she'd blown the whole thing off. Tra la la, Buffy's got a party to go to, let the boys handle it.

Of course Spike hadn't told her about the bet then, and had probably only mentioned the Krallock demon because he was certain she wouldn't be patrolling that night. And then they'd both forgotten about it, what with the world ending again and all. He _had_ been holding out on her. Buffy right, Spike wrong. But the truth was, if she'd found out about the bet before the Willow Incident, she'd have shrugged it off with an eye-roll and a wrist-slap: _That's just Spike_.

She'd put up a good show of confidence for him, but what had happened last night was...paralyzing. Right now she should be considering the possibility that this was really it, the very best that Spike could manage. That the question wasn't if he'd slip up, but when and how. That in the end, trying wasn't enough. That sooner or later it was going to be someone besides Willow backed up against a wall in a dead-end alley, and...

...and she couldn't. Literally couldn't; her mind veered off and refused to go to the World Without Spike. She thought instead about the Slayers whose lives and deaths were recorded in Giles's journals, not the ones who'd thrown caution to the winds and followed their hearts to whatever dark end awaited them, but the others: the good girls, the ones who'd listened to their Watchers and beaten and bound their midnight yearnings into submission. The ones who'd never known the touch of cool fingers on heated flesh, the ones who, if they'd ever looked into inhuman eyes and seen their own souls reflected there, had resolutely looked away again and turned those betraying mirrors to dust.

Between the lines of their Watcher's reports, they didn't sound happy, those long-gone sisters of hers, but happy wasn't part of the Slayer fringe benefits package. If the only choices were Faith's fall into darkness or Kendra's sterile devotion to duty, then maybe slipping back into the numb grey fog that still lurked around the edges of her mind would be a welcome relief.

As she approached the intersection with Wilkins, she heard voices--meaningless parrot-clamor, heedless of who or what heard it. Buffy froze, hand straying towards her purse to caress the hard deadly length of ash-wood concealed therein. She so wanted to kill something right now, something big and fast and deadly, something that would make her sweat and scream. With swift noiseless grace she faded back into the shadows between streetlights and crouched low, stake at ready.

"...don't wanna, too bright, too bright..."

"...told you the mind, the brain, it doesn't match, we need to find the painted part--red, you see? Right there..."

"...walking, keep walking, you know where the lines are..."

"...soon, soon, you can't keep a revolving door open like that!"

A small crowd of people in shabby clothes shuffled down the middle of Wilkins Boulevard, weaving in and out of the double yellow stripes of the left-hand turn lane in a Pied Piper gavotte. There must have been a dozen of them, unshaven men and wild-eyed women of all ages and ethnicities, their only commonality the distinctive odor of eau de landfill. It was the crazies, all of them, tumbling along like human lemmings towards some invisible cliff. The sparse Tuesday night traffic whizzed by on either side, the blat of horns and drivers' fervid curses cheering them on.

Peachy. She was craving a face-off with Godzilla, and opportunity knocked wanting her to babysit Pikachu. Should she try to herd them out of the street, at least? Tanner and the others who'd been in the alley during Willow's interrupted spell looked cognizant of the fact that they were walking down the middle of a major thoroughfare, and not at all happy about it.

"...get it off and do something?" the man in the yellow windbreaker asked.

Tanner shook his head and gave the pendant around his neck a vicious yank which ought to have broken the slender silver chain, but didn't. "You saw what happened when I tried. Hell, even if I could get it off, I couldn't match her power. Especially with that thing backing her up. If she lets up for a minute maybe I can call up my _met tet_ and see if there's anything he can do, but..." He raked a hand through his lank hair and glanced down the street. "Fuck. If a truck heads down here, we're roadkill."

Tara's geas was still in effect, then, and he wouldn't be able to bring any magic to bear. Buffy crept closer to the intersection, keeping to the base of the fence. There was a better than good chance that 'she' was Willow, and that following the crazies would provide a guided tour of the Secret Underground Lair. Maybe she should call Giles or Tara and tell them...

She pressed her lips together, sealing in the anger that still knotted in her stomach at the memory of Spike cradling Dawn's frail body in the alley, the frantic drive home and her sister's pale, drained face framed in lavender pillowcases. No. She wanted--needed--to talk to Willow alone before calling in the cavalry. Needed to make sense of this. As the procession meandered through the intersection like a flock of inept sheep, Buffy left the cover of the fence, melting from shadow to shadow in pursuit of her skittish prey.

Three blocks later, Buffy crouched behind a mailbox watching Tanner and Windbreaker Guy kneeling in the gutter and yanking free the grate covering the mouth of a culvert running under Wilkins. Buffy waited until the last pair of plastic flipflops and grubby Nikes had wriggled through the dank entrance, then darted across the street. She dropped to her haunches beside the culvert, avoiding the clots of oily black sludge they'd kicked out of the pipe, and peered inside. The fetid odor triggered an involuntary stomach clench. Something considerably deader than Spike had set up shop down here at some point. Tres ick.

The culvert was black as midnight, and she'd gotten out of the habit of carrying a flashlight with her for peering into dark icky holes. Why bother, when she had a faithful vampire companion to whose eyes midnight was clear as noon? Alas, FVC's eyes inconveniently not present. Well, so what? She'd patrolled without benefit of Spike's enhanced senses for years. If the sanity-challenged could do it...

With a grimace of disgust, Buffy crouched down and crawled into the culvert, shuddering at the squish and slurp of mud and slime beneath her hands and knees. By feeling carefully ahead on the tunnel floor when she came to a fork, she could track the crazies by the churned-up sludge in the bottom, but it was slow going. The sounds of the scuffling feet and crazy-babble ahead of her grew steadily more distant.

Through the culvert, down a shaft, into a larger tunnel echoing with Pillip Glass arpeggios of icy water droplets and glowing faintly with phosphorescent slime--by the time she could stand upright again, Buffy could see her hand in front of her face, an inky shape occluding the twinkling constellations of algae. A T-intersection led her into a better-lit tunnel; it zig-zagged past several small openings which, on investigation, proved to lead to recently-abandoned demon lairs. Other than the faint marks of the crazies' muddy footprints, there was no sign of current habitation.

"Willow?" she called. Her voice echoed willow, willow back to her, a thin, lost shadow of itself. "Willow! It's me. If you're in here, I just want to talk!"

The tunnel continued to grow drier and lighter, and Buffy passed several heaps of Initiative-themed trash--shreds of old uniforms, crushed circuit boards, crumpled-up rations wrappers. She was pretty sure this was too far away from the UC Sunnydale campus to be part of the main Initiative complex, but they'd had access tunnels leading all over town just like everyone else. Someday an earthquake would hit just right and Sunnydale would undergo a dramatic re-enactment of the closing scenes of _Paint Your Wagon_. Hopefully sans the musical stylings of Clint Eastwood; there was only so much evil you could take, even on a Hellmouth.

Up ahead, a tawny flicker familiar from years of tomb-crawling spilled out into the corridor--candles, lots of them. Must be somebody evil; the black hats had an unreasonable prejudice against Southern California Edison. The tunnel terminated in a massive archway of granite blocks, piled one on the other without enough room to slip a knife-blade between them. The stone was the rich dark red of venous blood, glittering with mica inclusions which gave it a liquid sheen in the candlelight. Each block was incised with symbol which Buffy could describe with exacting technical expertise as hinky-looking. She felt a fleeting regret for the days when Giles had patroled with her on a regular basis; he probably could have told her whether she was looking at 'Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here' or 'Ladies -- Gents.'

Beyond the archway the tunnel expanded into a vast, shadowy cavern with several other visible entrances. Buffy's thumbs prickled as she flattened herself to the wall and edged closer, suppressing more ick-noises as the light revealed more details about the post-slime-crawl state of her clothes (the state of her hair didn't bear thinking about). The cavern was filled with people, or things, or things that looked like people. It was impossible to get a clear idea how many there were; everyone was rushing around like an out-take from _Koyanisqaatsi_, and opposing ranks of candles set squadrons of shadows battling across hall. The air was smoky and redolent of licorice and sewer sludge.

Tanner and his band were encamped just inside the archway to her left. One or two of them were wandering aimlessly around the perimeter of their territory, but most had collapsed to the cavern's sandy floor and sat in huddles of two or three, rocking back and forth. Tanner himself was standing watch, his expression that of a man convinced nothing he can do will matter. He was stroking his stubbled jaw with one hand and muttering under his breath. She caught '..._ou cheval_...' but her half-forgotten high school French wasn't up to deciphering the rest. His eyes never left the far side of the cavern, where a crowd of withered-up bald guys in the requisite tatty robes were--

Withered-up bald guys. Withered-up bald guys with bone-and-feather-draped staves and their wrinkled kid-glove flaps of eyelids sewn shut over the gaping empty sockets staring back into the maggots curling in their own brains--Buffy whipped back around the corner and pressed both palms flat to the wall, breath hissing through her clenched teeth.

Harbingers. Servitors of ultimate evil. Well, big fat hairy whoop with a cherry on top. Last time they'd shown their faces in Sunnydale, she'd kicked their scrawny asses, and she'd do it again. And there, surrounded by Harbingers like Scarlett O'Hara by beaux, was Willow, enthroned on a scuzzed-up lab bench. Plain old ordinary Willow in batik and Birkenstocks, tucking a strand of burning auburn behind one ear as she studied some kind of Star Trek tri-d chessboard thingy laid out on the cavern floor. Anticlimax much? How dare she look so normal, so--so Willow?

OK, so maybe the long black shadow trailing from her shoulders was a smidge on the over-dramatic side. Willow bent to move several of the figures around on her gameboard and sat back again to study the effect, nibbling on a thumbnail. "By George," she murmured, "I think we've got it. You don't really have a George vibe, but it would be better than Creepy Eyeless Guy."

The Harbinger hovering at her shoulder gripped his staff and looked constipated. "Exalted Vessel, this is unnecessarily risky."

Willow's eyes flashed--no figure of speech, they really flashed. "Maybe. That's why you chose me, isn't it?" She bared pearly teeth at the Harbinger. "I take unnecessary risks." She moved another playing piece. "We'll need Dawn to get the job done, of course." She glanced over at Tanner. "Take your pals, get the Key, and bring her here."

Tanner blinked, expressionless, and his muttering trailed off. "Why?"

"Look, Mr. Tanner, I'm sorry, but I really don't have time to argue about this." Willow got up and strode over to face Tanner, chin tipped defiantly and hands on hips. "If you do what I tell you to, all your friends will be cured, I'll break that little geas you've got going there, and incidentally, we save the world." She reached up and patted his shoulder. "And if you don't do what I tell you, I'll turn you into a weasel and your buddies into chickens and we'll see how well you all get along."

Tanner regarded her with a mixture of loathing and pity. "When?"

"As soon as possible. I want to do some test runs before we do this for real." Willow rolled her lower lip between her teeth. "You'll need to get cleaned up. Don't hurt her, and don't scare her more than you have to. If you can get her to come with you on her own, great. Tell her Buffy wants her, or you've found me--be creative." She began pacing. "I'm not the bad guy here. I know what I'm--"

The noise behind her was a tiny thing, no louder than the sound of a grain of sand scraping against stone under the pressure of a bare toe. Buffy whirled and snapped a straight-legged kick into the midriff of the Harbinger behind her. He doubled over with a grunt and Buffy used the momentum of her recovery to slam the heel of her hand into the nose of her second assailant, who howled in agony and staggered backwards, painting the blood-colored stone with Jackson Pollack splatters of the real thing. Buffy slammed the first one head-first into the wall and turned back to face the archway; Willow had frozen mid-turn, mouth an O of startlement, eyes popping in surprise. "I really hope there was a two-for-one special on at Henchmen R Us, Wills, 'cause otherwise--"

"Darn it, Buffy!" Willow stamped a foot in frustration and thrust out a hand. "You're not supposed to be here yet! _Thicken!_"

*****

Willy the Snitch was, quite possibly, the world's foremost authority on the effects of alcohol on vampiric physiology. In twenty years of tending bar on the Hellmouth, he'd gathered volumes of practical information on the subject. Vampires, for example, didn't really have a greater tolerance for alcohol than humans. It was just that, given their lack of circulating blood, it took longer for the stuff to percolate through their systems. They could appear unaffected for hours, sometimes, until booze met brain, and then they'd go from stone cold sober to completely plastered in a matter of minutes. Willy had known to a nicety exactly when the combined effects of the half-dozen Cuervo Gold shots she'd downed would hit Darla like a load of twenty-four karat bricks, and the precise level Angelus's bottle of cheap-ass Irish whiskey needed to fall to before it was safe to press him about paying his tab. His talent had saved his life on more than one occasion.

He fervently hoped that this was one of them.

"...'n you know what the bloody bitch of a bloody Slayer says? 'It's hard!' Hard, she says!" Spike pinned Willy with an irate glare, tossed back another three fingers of bourbon and slammed the shot glass down on the bar. "Like it's been a bouquet of bloody posies for me! Gimmenothershot."

Willy complied, sloshing a few drops over the side of the glass. Nerves. Two hours and thirty-three minutes since Spike had strutted in at the Slayer's side, and he was nostalgic for the good old days of the chip already. Spike was harder to get tanked than some vampires--for one thing, despite being a comparatively small man, he had a high tolerance for the sauce, made higher by his unvampiric habits. Most vamps only drank to blend in with human prey, but Spike actually liked the stuff and put away as much as a human on a regular basis. Plus he tended to eat solid food with his liquor. However, if Willy was any judge, despite the severe inroads Spike'd made on the pretzel dish, the transition from random outbreaks of violence to sobbing into his glass and reciting Shelley was only a shot or two away.

Chilly fingers clamped down on his wrist with enough force to make the bones grind together, and Spike yanked his left, non-pouring hand up and shook it in front of Willy's face. "Are these broken?" the vampire demanded.

"Uh...not yet?"

"Bloody right! And not gonna be, either, 'cause yours truly's a white hat now." Spike released his wrist with a self-righteous sniff and Willy massaged it surreptitiously. _Ow, ow, ow..._ Spike leveled an index finger at Willy's sternum and poked him in the chest. "'Nless you really piss me off. 'S fair, innit?"

"Very fair. Couldn't ask for better." Except that Spike got really pissed off at stray breezes. "Uh...Spike...about your tab..." This was, after all, the good bourbon, and Spike had long since exceeded the change from his twenty.

"Haven't broken any fingers in ever so." Spike's eyes clouded with wistful nostalgia. "Make such nice noise when they come out of the sockets, too. Pop-pop-pop!"

"What I mean to say is, it's on the house." At least until Spike passed out, at which point Willy could roll him in peace and quiet.

"No fun for poor old Spike, not a lick, not a nibble. 'S what she'd want. But Carrie Nation doesn't think I can do it," Spike continued dolefully. "She's the Slayer, y'know. All responsible-like."

Willy nodded, attempting sympathy, an emotion he was as ill-equipped as most vampires to express. "Eh, well, dames... you can't trust none of 'em."

Spike grabbed him by the lapels and hauled him across the bar for the second time that night, nose to flattened nose and eye to bloodshot golden eye. "Can't trust the Slayer? Did I just hear you insultin' my lady?" he snarled. "Trust 'er with my life, with my heart..." He let go with his left hand to give his chest an illustrative slap and Willy canted abruptly to one side. Spike let him drop and sat down with a thump, half-sliding off the barstool. He gripped the edge of the bar for a second, looking faintly surprised, and then hauled himself upright, gazing at Willy with earnest, tear-filled eyes (which looked damned weird in vamp face). "But she can't trust me. 'Cause 'm evil. Almos' ate Red, y'know. An' the hypoth--'naginary ol' lady." He frowned. "_She_ never brought me cookies."

"Ain't no one perfect," Willy said consolingly.

A tear spilled over and ran down one cheek, and Spike flopped bonelessly forward, banging his forehead against the bar. He moaned into the oak grain with impassioned frenzy, "Oh, Buffy, Buffy, I never meant to hurt you, love! Love you so much, m' brave, strong, beautiful bitch..." One hand encountered the bottle, and dragged it into view. Spike peered at the label with a muzzy frown, then slowly appeared to divine that the world wasn't sideways, he was. He sat up again, not without some effort. "But I did hurt her, Willy. Abused her trust. 'M a cad, Willy, 'm a bad, evil man." He took another slug of Jim Beam directly from the bottle and blinked through a fresh flood of tears. "Do anything to make it up to her, any-bloody-thing. Chuck Dru. Give up the killin'. Wear a soddin' Windsor." After a moment of contemplation, "No, wait, already done those. Gotta be somethin' else. You ever been in love, Willy?"

Willy considered. "As a man of the world, I can say for certain that chicks dig a paid-in-full bar tab." He made a stealthy grab for the bourbon, but Spike's reflexes were still more than sufficient to retain possession. "I knew this stripper name of Mabel, once," he said, reminiscent. "She did this thing with tassels that..."

"Faugh!" Spike waved a grandiloquent hand. "Mere amin--animal attraction! 'M talkin' love! Many-bloody-splendored thing! 'To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates'--bloody hell, I'd have Red mojo my soddin' soul back, if tha's what it took, even if it turned me back into that sniveling li'l four-eyed, weak-livered, Pre-Raphaelite nancy-boy..." Spike sniffled in an excess of self-pity, contemplating the potential horrors of re-Williamization. "Make sure Red fixed the no-shagging clause first." He sighed heavily. "But 's gone, poof!" He drove his free hand into his duster pockets in a search for more cigarettes, shoulders slumped in dejection.

Willy eyed the bottle, calculated the white-knuckled intensity of Spike's grip thereon, and decided against trying to retrieve it. "Yeah, that's sad. Now--"

Spike's fingers, groping through his pockets, closed on something. His transformation was instantaneous and remarkable--from the Stygian depths of gloom, his eyes lit like sunrise and a huge, joyfully wicked grin spread across his once-more-human face. "But I've still got this," he said, voice hushed with the brilliance of his inspiration. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and opened it; in his palm was a small silvery disk covered with printed circuits. "If she can take it out, she can put it back in," Spike crowed. "That'll show the Slayer I mean business!" He rose with unsteady dignity, bottle still firmly in hand.

"Hey, maybe you should let Clem--"

Spike shot a withering glance across the room, to the table where Clem was still sitting, nibbling on the remains of Buffy's nachos and watching the show with a distinctly worried cast to his wrinkled countenance. "Bugger Clem! Got me a witch to catch." With that the vampire drew his duster round him with a flourish and stalked towards the door. A few minutes later, the roar of the Triumph split the night.

*****

At Willow's word, the air turned to liquid glass and Buffy's rising arm dragged to a molasses-slow mid-air halt. Willow gestured again; the soap-bubble of force lofted into motion, and Buffy bounced slowly and gracefully through the archway into the center of the cavern. She forced herself to relax and hang limp in the grip of the enveloping air. She could breathe, barely, and move her eyes from side to side, but otherwise she might as well have been encased in Lucite, a Slayer-sized paperweight in the Hellmouth gift shop. Willow walked briskly across the cavern to meet her, and Tanner sidled after, eyeing Buffy with a look more calculating than the wise Evil Overlord would encourage in a henchman.

"Hey, Buffy." Willow looked harried and guilty and impatient all at once. Definitely overcaffienated. "I wasn't expecting you quite this soon, 'cause you've been so, um, busy with Spike lately and all, but I figured you'd be pretty testy whenever you got here, so--"

_Oh goody. I know how I feel about Willow now._ Mental clarity was a wonderful thing. "Testy? Testy is Giles after someone eats the last jelly donut. Me? Somewhere between 'mighty peeved' and 'crush, kill, destroy!' You almost killed Dawn!" Buffy lunged against her restraints, to no avail--the harder she struggled, the more tightly the spell gripped her. If she relaxed completely, would it loosen? Worth a try. Willow's spells usually burnt out fast. Except that this was New, Improved Super-Willow with Mega-Zapping Action.

New, Improved Willow did a cringy shoulder-hunch very reminiscent of Old, Unimproved Willow; then, recalling she held the upper hand, straightened angrily. "OK, we're having a little time-out here. Cooling-off period." She laced her hands together with a sidelong look at Buffy, her ire dissolving in a nervous laugh. "About last night, I totally didn't mean that to happen. I need you to know that. _Not_ my idea. I mean, it was, the spell, but not the whole agonizing Dawn death part. The spell was supposed to help them, supposed to--I didn't think. Dawn doesn't have any magical talent, so channeling that kind of power was...rougher on her than...but I know what went wrong, next time I'll add safeguards, I'll--"

"Next time? Will, are you mental? There's not going to be a next time!" Buffy interrupted, appalled. Stop, deep breath, serenity now--not the time to get into recriminations. "Can you understand it's a little tough for me to buy that you're sorry about last night when I walk in on plans for a Key-napping? Plus, the friendly native greeting?" She made an abortive attempt to wave at the ring of hostile, eyeless faces ringing the cavern. "Not so friendly. Lacking the complimentary lei and poi basket. Willow...I know things haven't been the best between us since I got back, but I thought--I tried--I thought it was getting better. Please. Make me understand why you're doing this."

Willow's brows knit and her pale face took on a sickly tinge in the smoky light. She wrapped her arms around her middle as if her stomach hurt. Buffy felt a stir of hope. Maybe she was getting through. "Buffy, I know I've done some questionable stuff. Bringing you back. It was wrong. I understand that now. It messed things up really bad, and I don't just mean the--the adjustment problems you're having--the Hellmouth, the gods wandering around, it's all connected, and if things don't change, what comes through the Hellmouth next will make that Harrier demon look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. I've screwed up--there aren't any words for how badly I've screwed up!" The distress in her eyes burnt off, replaced by a supercharged version of Resolve Face. "But I see it now. All of it." She glanced over at the chessboard thingy. "I understand what needs to be done to correct the Balance."

Buffy searched her friend's face, hunting for some comforting sign that this wasn't Willow talking. No all-black eyeballs, no Vader-type wheezing, no wiggy little brain-slugs glommed onto her medulla oblongata. Damn. "Willow--we know that already. The loa said someone had to leave the playing field--and..." Buffy squeezed her eyes shut for a second. She couldn't bear thinking of the World Without Spike, but the World Without Buffy...heck, she racked up frequent flyer miles there on a regular basis. "--if that's what it takes, then...that's what it takes, but do you do know what you're dealing with here? These Harbingers channel the power of the First Evil. You remember the First Evil? Skanky-looking dude with an 'Ultimate Evil--Ask Me How!' button, almost convinced Angel to take a sunrise stroll? Beyond time, beyond space, beyond boring when he gets to yammering? You know, _evil?_ You can't trust anything it tells you."

Anger sparked in green eyes. "I think the phrase is 'Duh?' We haven't been formally introduced, but I've gathered he's been pretty naughty. I'm not stupid, Buffy. I realize there are evilness issues. But hey, guess what, everything it's told me fits in exactly with what the loa told us. The Balance is out of whack, and you're part of the reason why. You and Spike. And all the rest of us, in our tiny insignificant not-nearly-as-important-as-the-Slayer ways, but mainly the two of you."

"Spike?" That made no sense at all. Spike wasn't--and she knew better than anyone--_good_, no matter how hard he tried. "How can he--Spike's just a vampire."

"Apparently that's part of the problem." Willow clasped her hands behind her back and began circling like an exceptionally diffident and apologetic shark. Tanner skittered out of her way, muttering under his breath again. He clutched Tara's pendant in one hand and scrabbled through his coat pocket with the other; it emerged with half a battered granola bar, which he began crumbling onto the cavern floor with quick nervous finger-spasms. "But I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix everything."

"Fix? What is this fix? By using Dawn for your reindeer games again? I can't let you do that."

Willow stopped circling and brushed the hair from her eyes with a twitchy little grin. "Kinda figured. Hence the current immobileness of you. I understand where you're coming from, Buffy, but I can't let you interfere with this. This is too important, and, well, let's face it, you're not exactly focused on the world saveage these days, are you? You've kind of gone off the whole sacred duty thing. We saw it last year with Dawn, and now you're off on this kinky little slaying-for-fun-and-profit kick with Spike, and honestly? I don't know if we can count on you to make the hard decisions any longer."

She'd been thinking as much herself, but it smarted more coming from someone else. Willow snaked closer, growing more confident as guilt flowered in Buffy's eyes. Her voice dropped, her tone becoming intimate. "Like for instance last night." She ran a finger across the convex surface of the bubble with one hand, drawing patterns on air. "You want to know how close Spike came to killing me? And how much he was... enjoying himself doing it? Or would that make it too _hard_ on you?" The gameboard was replaced by a shimmering vison of Spike licking Willow's blood from his finger with voluptuous pleasure. Buffy's stomach did a flip-flop.

"He stopped. He didn't...and you were trying to get him to...!"

"He stopped. This time," Willow said. "Maybe that kind of thing doesn't bother you. After all, up against a wall while a vampire goes for your neck? Your idea of a hot date, right? I'd have to dig a little deeper to shock the Buffster. Let's see what we've got in the Locker O' Repressed Spikey Thoughts--" A ripple of power, and she reached through the force-bubble to touch fingertips to Buffy's forehead. Buffy felt a sharp cold twinge in her skull as the scene before them changed.

_Dull gleam of steel. Limbs white as milk splayed across the dark hunter-green of the bedspread. He watched her from the pillows, knowing eyes following her every movement. A well-treated slave, this, sleek with good feeding, the sharp angles of his bones all sheathed in smooth strokable skin and solid rolling muscle, his body a symphony of moonlight and ivory, rawhide and steel. The chains pulled his arms up over his head, so that the muscles of his chest and shoulders stood out in sharp relief. Long pale fingers curled around the links above the blued steel of the manacles, defenseless, almost tender (fingers that could snap a man's neck in three seconds flat). Tousled bone-colored curls, ice-blue eyes lazy beneath heavy lids and sooty lashes, cheekbones like twin scimitars--the lush mouth twitched and curved into a beckoning smile, and the heavy length of his cock, lying quiescent across one sinewy thigh, twitched to life and beckoned along with it..._

A dark hot bolt of desire shot straight through her, nipples to groin, and Buffy gasped. Willow laughed. "Oookay, didn't expect that one. Vampires in chains. We're large with the kink today, aren't we?"

Buffy tried and failed to jerk her head away, her eyes riveted by the vision's slow, incendiary smile as much as Willow's spell. _Spike. Chains. Sick._ Wasn't it? All that strength, all that ferocity, all that inhuman devotion, willingly submitted to her command...could you call it a fantasy if you knew the subject thereof would do it in a hot second?

"I understand now," Willow crooned. "It's not the sex. It's a power trip for you, isn't it? This whole thing with Spike. Someone loving you that much, much less the thing you're supposed to kill, the thing that's supposed to kill you? Gotta be a kick and a half. And you'd do just about anything to keep it. I get that, I really do."

Buffy swallowed. "That's not true. You know that's not true."

Willow's smile was almost flirty, and her eyes were filmed with jet. "Really? You were ready to sacrifice all of us for Dawn. Let's say it's part of the truth. Bad guy's privilege."

"I thought you weren't the bad guy."

That wiped the smirk off her face. She was all the old Willow for a moment, and really angry. "I'm not! God, Buffy, what do you take me for? Best friend for the last six years ring any kind of bell? I'm doing this so you _won't_ have to die again! So no one in Sunnydale will!"

Behind her, Tanner stumbled back a few steps and froze in place, shaken by volcanic convulsions. His head jerked back and the cords in his neck quivered with strain.

"Willow--" Buffy threw every ounce of impassioned sincerity she possessed into the name; she had to make this work, and never mind that her record for coaxing allies back from the brink of disaster was decidedly spotty. "Willow, if you're my friend, please, listen to me. For once in your life _don't_ try to fix things. Let this go. All for not dying, here, but I need to know what you're planning, 'cause doing it for them? Ends, means, construct your own platitude."

"It's easier to get forgiveness than permission." Willow's smile was barely there at all, only a wry twist of her lips. "I learned that from you. But it's really simple, just like the loa said. You're a problem because our team's got too many players. Spike's a problem because he's scoring goals for the wrong side. So all I have to is send you back where I got you from, and then--"

"Excuse me? This counts as not killing me exactly how?"

"I didn't say killing! I mean send you back as is, like Angel with Acathla! Minus the sword through the chest. And not permanently, just until I can do the other stuff I need to do with Spike--but first I need Dawn." Willow nodded at the lead Harbinger. "Like I said, not stupid. I don't keep the bargain I made, I don't keep my power. And I need that power..." There was something scary-raw in her voice for a moment, and then she was casual again. "...to save the world. To save you." She sighed. "So. I need Dawn. I mean, her help. I'm sorry, Buffy."

"Willow, I can't let--"

Willow turned away with a dismissive flip of one hand. "You don't get it yet, do you? You don't have any say in it. You'll be staying here awhile; I'll try to make you as comfortable as--"

Behind her, Tanner's eyes snapped open and his chin went down. He grinned, running a lascivious tongue-tip across his teeth, winked at Buffy, and pulled the pendant over his head. As Willow strode away he tiptoed towards Buffy in a parody of stealth, swinging with pendant propeller-fashion in one hand. When the spinning chunk of amethyst hit the surface of the force-bubble a shower of purple and gold sparks flew up; the amethyst crazed and shattered, and the spell melted into the air it had formed of. Willow jerked in surprise as the spell-energy snapped and dispersed, and whirled on Tanner, her eyes dark with fury. Tanner turned the grin on her and waggled his fingers. "I tell you we put a thumb on the scales now and then, _petite sorciere_."

Buffy was in motion instantly. She dove for Tanner even as his eyes rolled back in his head, his joints unhinged and he fell rag-doll limp to the cavern floor, scooping him up and flinging him over her shoulder. Could she get the rest of the crazies out by herself? "Ignis magnum!" Willow screamed behind her, and a bolt of black fire shot past Buffy's head, close enough that a few stray strands of hair frizzled in the heat. Bereft of their leader, the crazies screamed and scattered, losing themselves amidst the milling Harbingers.

Stone shifted and rumbled, and a shower of dirt and pebbles rained down from the ceiling. Realizing that random blasts of power weren't the smartest thing to be lobbing about in a tunnel-ridden earthquake zone, Willow yelled at the Harbingers and the crazies alike, "Stop them!"

Buffy flung Tanner's body through the archway and rolled after him, kicking off a pair of crazies who pawed at her with mindless determination. The Harbingers held back, letting the crazies do their work for them. She didn't want to hurt them; they were doubly pawns in this mess, but there wasn't much choice. She sucker-punched the nearest one, kneed Windbreaker Guy in the groin, and oh, shit, they were gonna get Tanner and he was her last best hope for finding out what Willow was up to--

"Bloody hell," said an aggrieved voice from the darkness further down the tunnel, "might have known you'd go off and start without me." Spike's pale head emerged from the shadows a second later. He strolled up, slightly unsteady on his feet, and took a pull from the bottle he was carrying. Finding his supply exhausted, he tipped the bottle up to one eye and peered up into it with a sorrowful little clucking noise. He cocked his head and watched Buffy bang two crazies' skulls together with great interest. "Ah, that's not a Krallock demon. 'S all right, then." He gestured with the empty bottle. "Red in there?"

"What do you think? A little help, Spike?" Buffy snapped.

"Sure thing, pet. Jus' got something to take care of first. Show you I can..." Spike stepped around Tanner's prone form with exaggerated care, smashed the bottle smartly over the head of an oncoming Harbinger, and waved at Willow through the archway. "Oi, Will! Sorry about the bit in the alley, but you smelled bloody marvelous. 'M only inhuman, aren't I? About this chip, love, thought it over--it's a pain in the arse... well, in the head, but--YOW!" He belly-flopped to the ground as a jagged bolt of ultraviolet lightning scorched the air where his head had been, blinking up at Willow with utter confusion. "Not taking visitors, then?"

The blast hit the side of the archway and arcane energy coruscated across the stone; the deep-carven symbols glowed blue-white for a second and another ominous rumble shook the cavern. Buffy got a split-second glimpse of Willow staring up at the ceiling with 'oops!' written across her face in flashing neon letters, and then a gunshot crack of stone heralded the fall of a whole slab of rock from the cavern roof. The crazies abruptly ceased their attack as Willow withdrew her energies to concentrate on more pressing matters.

"Spike! Get out of there!" Buffy tossed the last of the crazies off, manhandled Tanner across her shoulders in a fireman's carry, and staggered off down the tunnel as the air filled with dust and smoke. The candles winked out behind her, and the ground heaved and buckled under her feet, throwing her to her knees. Buffy struggled up again, coughing. She couldn't breathe--stop, drop and roll? Or was that only for fires and not underground cave-ins? _ At least we're a Clint-free zone._ A fist-sized rock bounced off the top of her skull and she dropped to one knee, biting her tongue. The dust was so thick she could taste it, coating her mouth with grit with every labored breath. This was the T-intersection--which branch? Her head throbbed and she couldn't breathe and--

The last thing she remembered as the world went from black to blacker was a pair of cold hands seizing her around the waist.

*****

The thing about sleeping all day was it left you restless and bored all night. Dawn rolled over and pummeled her pillow, knowing that in five minutes this position would become as unbearable as the last. She pulled the sheet straight where her tossing and turning had bunched it up under the blankets and glanced at the clock. After three. Wonderful. She'd finally get tired in another hour and get rousted out of bed in another four. Just in time to be packed off to the Cultural Indoctrination Center, as Spike had not-so-affectionately referred to her high school during their summer of nocturnal excursions around Sunnydale.

In the last day those memories had gone all sepia-toned, as if Spike were someone she'd known in a distant, dissolute youth. She could pull them out and look them over like a collection of old photographs: _This is a picture of me and my monster._ But Spike wouldn't stay safely pinned to the pages of an album; tomorrow he'd be full-color and three-dimensional again and she'd have to tell him--what? Leave me alone? We can't be friends anymore? And how awkward would that be when Buffy was practically taking out ads in the _Press_ saying "Relocated: William The Bloody, Esq. recently of Restfield Cemetery, to 1630 Revello Drive?"

The glass panes in her window vibrated; Spike's motorcycle was pulling into the driveway. It was rapidly establishing its own private grease spot next to the Jeep. If Spike started leaving the DeSoto over here too, driveway space was going to be at a premium, especially if Dad could be convinced that a car for her sixteenth birthday was an essential. Strangely, with all the angst over dealing with vampires, no one ever considered the parking issues. Dawn heard the sound of the front door opening, followed by a series of mysterious thumps, as of shins on furniture, and an indistinct but heartfelt string of curses. A moment later the footsteps started up the stairs.

"--be all right on the couch?" Her sister sounded wiped, far more so than she usually did coming in from patrol.

"If he's as knackered as I was after the old bastard took me over, he won't move till morning." Spike sounded unnaturally subdued too. "Well. You're sorted. Guess I should bugger off, then."

"You don't need to--I mean, one of us will have to keep an eye on him till Tara wakes up. Which could be me, if--"

The foot-shuffling was palpable. "I can hang about."

There was a short, awkward pause. "You're kind of a mess. If you want to use the shower first..."

"Oh." Startled. "Yeh, sure."

"You know where the towels are." Pause. "Spike?"

The door of the linen cabinet squeaked when the humidity was high. "Yeh?"

"How'd you know I was down there?"

An embarrassed clearing of his throat. "Didn't. Went down looking for Will. Wandered about a bit, sensed you, went to take a look."

Of course. "Do you have any idea how colossally huge the magnitude of the dopehood you've achieved is? She could have--"

Wince. "I'm accumulating clues." Rustle of terrycloth being pulled from the shelf, another awkward pause. "I just thought...if I had her put it back, everything'd all come right again. Worked about as well as the usual run of my plans, I s'pose."

"Oh, God, Spike..." Her sister heaved a sigh. "Maybe she could put it back, but I don't think it makes the top five on Willow's Things To Do, Worlds To Conquer list. Besides, it's not about the chip. It's about _you_. Look, you found out the Krallock was in town when, last Tuesday? And didn't mention it till Sunday night, and OK, I blew it off then, bad Buffy, but not the point! The chip didn't stop you doing that. The chip didn't even stop you from hurting humans if you really, really wanted to, and it sure didn't stop you from hurting Willow. _You_ did that, all by yourself. Put the chip back in your head this minute and you're still... you. A lying, stealing, semi-employed cigarette-smoking poker cheat of a vampire. Who I can't imagine living without." A tremulous note entered her voice. "And you were driving that motorcycle around drunk off your skinny undead ass, weren't you?"

Spike sounded injured. "Yeh, so? I've driven a hell of a lot farther a hell of a lot drunker than that...ah." He heaved a matching sigh. "More hypothetical old ladies mowed under my wheels, eh?"

"Or you could have wiped out and broken every bone in your stupid unhelmeted body, because contrary to popular belief, when hair gel meets pavement, pavement wins!" There was a sharp thwack, as of Slayer palm meeting muscular vampire shoulder at moderate velocity, and then broken, indeterminate gulping noises from Buffy.

"Ah, pet, sweet, don't..."

"If you can't--if you can't..."

Dawn couldn't divine what her sister was freaking about, but Spike was better at translating Buffy-speak than she was. "I'm yours, love. To kill...or not. Haven't I said it enough? Rather die than hurt you, and if you really believe I can't, stake me now, before it's too late. Or say the word and I'll do it myself, eyes open, so the last thing I see is your face."

A muffled sob; Dawn could imagine Buffy, face pressed to Spike's chest, face screwed up in the way it did when she didn't want to cry and was pouring tears anyway. "No! Do you think that's romantic? It's sick! Willow's wrong, she's wrong, you're not my--I don't want you like that! I _can't_ kill you! Just thinking about it tears holes in me!"

"And you wonder why I wanted the sodding chip back in my skull?" Spike demanded. "If there's anything I can do to save you pain, I'll do it. Do you understand? _Anything!_" He gentled in an instant, voice melting from sandpaper snarl to smoke and velvet. "But you could, love, you know you could. And if I--deserved it, I'd want to go by your hand. Fitting. Because you're the Slayer, and you are that strong. Because I love you. Because...because if I do ever hurt you like that, I'll owe you my death. But I'll fight every beastie in Hell, self included, before I let it come to that--believe that, Buffy. If you believe nothing else, believe I'll fight!"

Her sister's voice shook, but there was nothing weak in it. "I do, William. I do--_you_ have to believe that! It's the times you don't realize you need to fight that--" She choked on another sob. And there was silence again, the ragged, gasping, salt-edged silence of two people with no answers holding one another tight against the monsters within. Dawn lay absolutely still beneath the sedimentary layers of sheets and blankets, hoping that Spike was too preoccupied to be listening to the telltale waking rhythm of her breath and heartbeat. Buffy laughed, a weak, pained little giggle. "You know, when I said there was no way this wasn't going to hurt, I was hoping for, I don't know, maybe a month's worth of carefree smoochies before my life turned into an Alanis Morrisette song again."

Spike's deeper chuckle had real humor in it. "Ah, well, there you have it, pet--'s the reason we've had to cram a month's worth of shagging into the past week."

Buffy's laugh was a little stronger this time. "Shut up and go take your shower. I'm still mad at you."

Dawn heard the ghost of a smile in his reply. "Mutual, oh she of the lone visits to barmy witches."

The sound of the bathroom door closing masked the faint creak of her own door opening. Buffy peeked in, her small figure a dark shape against the dim light in the hall. Dawn rolled over, stretched, and made ostentatious waking-up noises. "Buffy? When did you get in?"

"Just now." Her sister slipped inside, leaving the door ajar, as Dawn reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. Both of them blinked at the sudden flood of light. "We found Tanner. All the crazies, actually, but he was the only one we could snag. He's conked out on the couch, so fair warning." Buffy sat down on the side of the bed and brushed the backs of her knuckles across Dawn's forehead. "You're cooler," she observed. "How are you feeling?"

Dawn squirmed up from underneath the blankets, wrestled her pillow into submission and propped herself upright against the headboard. "Crummy, but better." She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Buffy's hair was a mess, and she looked as if she'd been liberally dunked in slime and then sand-blasted. Her face and the backs of her hands and her bare forearms were covered with scratches and scrapes. A swelling purple bruise marred her forehead just at the hairline, and tear-tracks smeared the dust on her cheeks. "You look snazzy. What happened?"

"Mayhem, destruction, the usual. You should see Spike; he was on top of me. Uh, not like that. I think he's got a cracked rib, but he's being all macho vamp." Buffy sighed and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. "I tell Willow and I tell her not to play with magic in the house, but it's all fun and games till someone has a roof fall on them--no, I'm fine, Dawn, honest. That Tanner dude freed me, I saved him, Spike dragged us both out when oxygen became an issue--it's a whole big heartwarming team effort." Buffy slumped over and leaned against the headboard, rubbing the sides of her nose with both hands. "He wanted Willow to put the chip back in. His brain was probably affected by his alcohol stream being contaminated with blood or something, but why he thought she would--"

"She took it out."

Buffy's hands stilled, then came to rest in her lap. "What?"

"Willow's the one who took the chip out." Dawn drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. "I'm pretty sure, anyway. Monday afternoon, when Spike came over? I went down to the basement and talked to him about it, and I'd just figured out that someone had done something to him without him wanting it, and Willow came down and...froze me, with a spell, and made me forget what I'd figured out." She unfolded, extending her legs stiffly and making blanket tents with her toes, trying to still the trembling of remembered betrayal and words as sweet and poisonous as antifreeze. "She just made me forget. Like it was nothing. Like I was nothing. And then she used me for that spell like I was just a--a battery!" She drew a hot angry breath. "I guess I'm AC and her spell was DC, though--when we did the ritual, the big green energy surge thing? Me, I guess. I must have messed the forgetting spell up. Everything's been coming back in pieces all day."

"Willow took...well, that just...figures." Buffy rubbed the back of one hand across her eyes, adding dark mascara-streaks to the dust and tear-tracks. "Good. I guess. In a relative way. Keep all your baddies in one basket, I always say."

Dawn's voice sounded thin and scratchy in her own ears, a million-year-old 78 RPM phonograph record to go with all those sepia-toned summer memories. "I thought--I thought she liked me. She was so good to me while you were gone--she talked her parents into letting me stay with them, she helped Giles find Dad, she and Tara... they did the daytime stuff with me. It was like--I wasn't Buffy's dumb little sister for awhile. I was _somebody._ And now she just takes it away--it's not fair! _She's_ got a soul! Why is she doing this?"

Buffy slid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into a hug, and it felt weird because she was taller than Buffy now by inches. "She does still like you. Somewhere inside. She's messed up, and we have to stop her--maybe we have to fight her. But she's still the Willow who's my friend, the Willow who was good to you. We just have to help her find that part of herself again."

"How can you love her?" Dawn asked. "How can you love him? When all that happens is they hurt you?"

She felt a shiver go through her sister's slender body. "Because when you don't love them...it hurts a lot worse."

Dawn bent her head to press her cheek to her sister's, and the two of them sat there together, lapped in golden light. The white-noise rattle of the shower shut off abruptly in the background (most likely it had occurred to Spike that using up all the hot water before Buffy had her turn was a Bad Thing) and when Dawn looked up a few moments later a slice of Spike--one sweatshirt-clad shoulder, the dark slash of a brow and one worried blue eye--was visible through the crack of the door.

She could never forget or ignore what she'd realized in the alley, but maybe it was like Willow helping Xander with algebra in high school; when you didn't know the answers, you talked to someone who did. Spike might have wanted her to say yes, but at least he'd asked the question, and taken her no seriously. She had choices. To treat him like the thing that he was, or the man he was trying to be--and was it terribly wrong of her to hold hard to the memory that Spike had never treated her like the thing that _she_ was?

Her eyes met his and didn't fall away, and the look on his face was like someone lighting a bank of candles inside, a glow blossoming from match-sized to something that could fill up the whole room. Spike ghosted into the room and eased down on one knee beside the bed, his strong cool arm joining Buffy's warm one around her shoulders. His damp hair made a wet spot on her sleeve. Didn't matter. Dawn felt the steady beat of her sister's pulse, and the long slow rise and fall of Spike's chest as her head dropped to his shoulder, and almost sobbed in relief as hundreds of tiny clenched fists relaxed in her gut. Things could never be what they had been, but maybe they could be something else.

She was drawn from Buffy, flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood in ways no other sisters in the world could claim. Sometimes she hated that knowledge. Sometimes, as now, it gave her an obscure sort of hope.


	32. Chapter 32

The morning paper was still scattered across the kitchen island: headlines full of anthrax scares, neighborhood squabbles with the zoning commission, and a string of burglaries down by the docks. It was both reassuring and annoying, the way the world puttered on oblivious to supernatural catastrophe. Giles supposed that those responsible for averting mundane catastrophes would think much the same of him.

"...no, I don't know for how long. I'm not even sure if." Buffy switched the phone from one shoulder to another, broke an egg into the glass of pig's blood and cooking sherry on the counter in front of her, and stirred vigorously. She was casual this morning in grey workout pants and a pink spaghetti-strap top, her hair pulled back in an all-business ponytail. Makeup obscured the evidence of too little sleep beneath her eyes, and her movements were quick and efficient, but there was tension below the surface, a sense of clockwork too tightly wound. "I just need to know if you can take her on short notice. Yes or no, Dad." She picked up a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in one hand and Tabasco in the other, examined both with a dubious frown, then shrugged and shook a generous dollop of each into the mix. "Fine. No, Mr. Giles or Spike will drive her up if it turns out--Dad, if I have to drive on the freeway there really will be an apocalypse. I'll let you know. And thank you." With clench-jawed reluctance she added, "Say hi to Linda."

She stood blinking in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, then rubbed her eyes. "Sorry. Sleepless in Sunnydale. Did you want anything? Coffee, orange juice, pig's blood if you're feeling adventurous? Totally covered in the beverage department."

"Surely after six years I've impressed upon you that tea is the requisite drink for bad news. At least, until after four in the afternoon, at which point Scotch becomes an acceptable alternative."

"Ah, so that's an English thing, not just a vampire thing. Got it." Buffy began rummaging through canisters and pulled out a handful of brightly colored foil packets. "Ummm... I think these are all Tara's, but she won't mind. Would you like Lemon Ginger Zest, Ginseng Goodness or Chamomile Raspberry Repose?"

"Er... surprise me." Spike's gradual insinuation into the Summers household wasn't something he was entirely comfortable with, but if it meant Buffy's indoctrination into the making of a proper cuppa, perhaps it was worth estrangement from the Council.

"Morning, pet. Rupert. Won't call it good." Spike slouched into the kitchen, massaging his temples as if every separate hair follicle hurt, and proceeded to insinuate his arms around Buffy. Buffy reached up and cupped the arch of his cheek in one hand, and the vampire leaned into her touch with a low rumbling growl, nuzzling her palm in a feral caress. The gesture was both tender and deeply disturbing, and Giles looked away with the feeling he'd seen something raw and private, and the even more uncomfortable realization that they'd trusted him to see it--a trust that made him complicit in something he didn't fully understand. In refusing Travers's proposal, he'd made a courageous stand for principle, or the biggest mistake of his life.

Tara appeared at Giles's side as silently as an apparition, and plunked a foot-tall stack of grimoires of assorted sizes and degrees of decrepitude down on the kitchen island. Dawn followed her in bearing the bells and candles. The younger Summers sister turned mulish as she spotted the phone on the counter. "You're not gonna pack me off to Dad's, are you?"

"It's one option." Buffy handed Spike the glass of curdled reddish- brown goo and stuck Giles's teacup blithely in the microwave. Giles winced and Spike went blank-eyed in horrified sympathy. She turned to Tara, her face a study in harsh compassion. "Anything?"

"Maybe," Tara said. Her eyes were red and her nose looked sore, but if she'd been crying, she'd not let it interfere with her work. "Page ninety-four." She opened the spellbook at the summit of the stack to the correct incantation and handed it to Giles. "It's a spellcloak. You can cast it around buildings so only certain types of people can see through it. There's a place in t-town that has one--they say you c-can't even find it unless you're a demon or into black magic."

"Rack's place?" Spike took a sniff of the revolting-looking mixture Buffy'd concocted and disposed of it in three ravenous gulps. He set his glass down and licked his chops with a nostalgic air. "Haven't been there in an age. Dru and I used to..." His eyes went to Dawn, and he cut himself off. "Clem was around when it went in. He told me it took a full coven a fortnight's worth of chanting and prancing about to set that one up."

Giles looked askance at Tara. "Are you certain you're up for this?"

Tara's fingers knotted in the folds of her skirt. "Willow could punch through any spell I can cast anyway, so there's no sense in trying for strong. What I can manage will only last a week or so, and it'll have to be very specific--generalities like 'no violence' or 'no evil' are a lot harder to enforce than 'No Willow' or 'No Harbingers.' I thought--I thought that if I used a little of everyone's energy the finished spell won't 'feel' like any one of us, and maybe she won't notice it at all."

"A disguise for a cloaking spell?" Giles closed the book and handed it back to Tara. "That's quite clever."

"I did a spell once," Buffy offered. "I could placehold. Give me weird words to say and I'll say 'em. And Spike--"

The vampire executed a shrug of studied and unconvincing indifference. "Done a thing or two in my time. Could lend a hand."

Tara went pale, then red, and stammered, "I mean, except, the kind of magic I do and the kind Spike's done don't, um--not mixy, much--"

Spike immediately adopted a disdainful sneer. "Could, but won't. No worries, Glinda. I shan't be mucking up the good vibrations."

"No, I didn't mean--I mean, I did mean--" Tara stopped, flustered, and Buffy's eyes narrowed. Her veneer of calm was beginning to acquire hairline cracks.

"Both of you can just suck it up and deal with one another," Giles interrupted, exasperated. "Spike, Tara doesn't trust you completely? Observe my tears. You nearly ate the love of her life. Stop being a tosser." He rounded on Tara, who jumped. "And when you're facing a witch who could snuff all of us out like wet lucifers and someone offers to help, bloody well say thank you very much."

Spike shuffled his feet and buried his nose in the remainder of his breakfast. "Um. Yeah. Whatever you need, kitten."

Tara went even redder. "I'll s-start setting up for the spell. Um... it might make things hard on the mailman."

Buffy, who'd been watching the whole exchange with the air of someone ready to bring out a squirt bottle if necessary, relaxed. "All we get is bills anyway. Do it. I called the school and said Dawn needed another day to kick her flu, so she can minion for you." Tara nodded and departed for the living room, Dawn in tow. Buffy rubbed the side of her nose. "Anya and Xander won't be free till after work, but Strategy Girl is thinking it's a bad idea to sit around and give the Harbingers time to find a new lair, set up a new altar and get down and be chanty again. We've got to hit them again while they're off-balance. Giles--in all the research you did on the First Evil when it went after Angel, did you ever discover any way of fighting it directly?"

Giles knew exactly what she was trying to avoid, and the words he had to say were stones in his belly. "I'm not sure it's possible to fight it directly. It's one of the fundamental forces underlying the metaphysical universe--one might as well attempt fighting the law of gravity. You can defy it for a moment here and there with a flying carpet or an airplane, but sooner or later..."

"So we'll get a flying carpet or an airplane." Buffy's eyes were polished agate. "It's not invincible, Giles. That was the mistake I made with Glory. I heard the word 'god' and fell apart. She was stronger and faster and tougher than me, but like I haven't fought a hundred creepy-crawlies that fit that description?" She clenched both fists together on the kitchen island and leaned forward, tiger-fierce. "Fundamental phooey. I don't care what it _is_. All I need to know is what it can do and what it can't do, and I'll figure out how to beat it."

"At the moment, anything Willow can do." Giles removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "The problem we face is that Willow's not simply being tricked or harried by the First's illusions. She's willingly accepted its power into herself, and the only way to defeat it may be..."

There was a long pregnant pause, and when Buffy spoke her voice was clipped and calm and precise. "I am sick and tired of being strong enough to kill my lovers, my sister, my friends, myself, rah rah go Slayer--but never quite strong enough to save them." From somewhere underneath the island came the ominous crack of wood about to splinter, and Spike laid a hand across hers. She looked down and let go of the countertop with a guilty start. "There has to be some way to separate them. We'll find it."

Giles nodded. "I'll go over everything again, of course." He already knew what he'd find. A part of him was already in mourning for the blithe red-haired girl who'd somehow slipped away in the last two years--but then, he thought, watching the Slayer's fingers twine through the vampire's, it was the nature of children to slip away and be replaced with bewildering suddenness by adults whom one barely knew. "In the meantime, as if we hadn't enough to occupy us..." He gave her a quick synopsis of Travers's phone call.

"So if money's the carrot, what's the stick?" Buffy wasn't overjoyed at his news, that much was obvious, but equally obviously the Council's machinations took a back seat in her mind to more pressing problems. "Are they sending the goon squad again? Pulling your visa?"

Giles turned his glasses over in the knife-edge of sun which penetrated the curtains, watching it slice shards of light from the metal rims. "Both, I expect. The first attempts will be feints. Travers isn't one to waste resources lightly. He's calling your bluff, but he'd find nothing so satisfying as seeing one or both of us come crawling and begging him to take us back into the fold."

The microwave dinged and Buffy handed Giles his tea. "I hope he's got a hobby to keep him busy while he waits. What I'd like to know is how they found out to begin with. If that guy with the camera was just getting confirmation--"

Dawn stuck her head back into the kitchen, brandishing scissors in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. "We need something personal from everyone. Hair would be good."

Buffy backed away, hands going protectively to her scalp. "Get thee behind me, Sweeney! The last time you cut my hair I had to go to the emergency room for severe emotional trauma."

Her sister rolled her eyes, expertly snipped a lock of Giles's hair before he could object, and advanced on Spike. "If you'd just stood still it would have matched Malibu Barbie perfectly." She dropped the sprinkling of platinum blonde curls into the bag with the pinch of greying brown and her own long dark tress, and handed Buffy the scissors. "Here, cut it yourself. And I know the Council is what you find in the dictionary when you look up 'stuffy,' but if you ask me all the moaning and thumping was probably a big clue."

Buffy went bright pink and almost sliced off an entire handful of hair. "We do _not_...thump."

Giles sighed and gave his teabag an unenthused poke with a spoon. "Dawn does have a point, Buffy. Spike's motorcycle has been parked in your driveway for the last three days, there's an ashtray on the front porch railing, it's nine in the morning and the curtains are drawn, and you're making pig's blood smoothies for breakfast. It doesn't take Sherlockian powers of deduction to ascertain that there's a vampire spending more time in your home than his own. The two of you may as well have left a trail of breadcrumbs for the Council's local informants. Still--"

"Motorcycle and ashtray says 'vampire?' I could be dating a Hell's Angel!" Giles raised an eyebrow, and Buffy crumpled. Spike gravely extended a finger and pressed her lower lip back in. "Anyway, if Travers is making with the ominous hints, Faith could be in big trouble right about now. I'll call Angel and have him--"

"Buffy...wait." Giles reached across the island and placed a hand on her forearm. "Perhaps it's a coincidence, but last weekend while you were in L.A., Angel called me to, er, discuss the two of you. He specifically brought up the possibility of the Council's finding out about your relationship. Travers knew the two of you were together; he did not realize the chip was no longer functioning. A Sunnydale informant would most likely have known about the latter development."

"No!" Buffy gave a vehement head-shake. "He wouldn't--Angel wasn't loving the concept of me with Spike, but he wouldn't do that..." She trailed off. "He wouldn't," she repeated, a little waver of uncertainty creeping in.

"Wouldn't he?" Spike's lip took on a reflexive curl at mention of his grandsire. "Not for spite or jealousy, no--he's too proud of his sodding soul for that. But for your own good? He thinks I'm taking the piss about sticking to the straight and narrow. Drop a word in that Travers git's ear, and if all goes well and Rupert cooperates, you and Dawn are set up for life and I'm out of the way without him having to sully his hands with my dust."

"And if Rupert proves recalcitrant," Giles finished, "then you and I are no worse off than we were the first time we broke from the Council, and the odds are excellent that the Council will try to eliminate Spike regardless."

"I don't believe it," Buffy repeated stonily, "Not unless I hear it from him."

Spike sucked his cheeks in and glanced at Giles; Giles mimed a shrug. There was no use in arguing with Buffy on this particular subject. "I may be wrong, of course," he said, in the tone which meant _I am anything but._

"There's this, too." Buffy's fingers closed upon Spike's, the blurred reflection of her hand in the Formica floating eerily on nothingness. "Point: Willow's _right._ I shouldn't be here. I'm upsetting the Balance and I should just let her zap me back to kingdom come. Counterpoint: Somehow I'm not thinking the Eyeless Brigade will shake hands, call it a draw and go home when I'm gone. But say we stop Wills--then what? Balance still all wonky." Her grip on Spike's fingers tightened. "I have never wanted to die less in my entire life, but--"

A chilly hand began weaving his intestines into elaborate knots, and Giles could see with perfect clarity that pale, peaceful face laid out amidst the rubble once more. _This is what a Slayer does. You know it's only a matter of time._

"No! You'll not be thinking of that, hear?" Spike ground out, putting voice to the protest Giles dared not allow himself. "Not you. Red said I was buggering things up by being a do-gooding ponce, didn't she? I've had a good century plus, and--" his voice went husky for a second-- "My taste of paradise. So if someone's got to kack it to even things up--"

Spike's motives might be the utterly selfish ones of keeping his beloved alive, but Giles could have wished Travers here, just so that he could watch the expression on the old git's face. Buffy remained unimpressed. "It's not your decision, Spike."

"And why the hell not?" he demanded. "Since when's it our lookout to keep the bleeding Balance in order anyway? Powers take a holiday?" He exhaled with an angry snort, warming to his argument. "What, next time we run across someone sharpening their fangs on a warm neck in a cold alley, we have to check our quota before dusting the wanker? What do we tell the dish of the day? 'Sorry, mate, can't save you, we've been too good this week!'"

"Loathe though I am to admit it, Spike has a point," Giles cut in. "We can no more hope from our mere mortal vantage point to understand the workings of the Balance, much less control it, than we can hope to destroy the First. You are the Slayer, Buffy, and your task is..."

He had to stop there, seeing the look in Buffy's eyes; sad and amused. "Kill vampires? The job description's kind of expanded on me in the last few years, Giles." She sighed. "But you're right, both of you. I can save the universe, but the day I start thinking I can run it I'll be playing in Willow's sandbox." The corners of her eyes crinkled--not a smile, but cousin to one. "Guess I'll just have to wing it. Think I can manage that?"

*****

"There! See? There goes another one."

Tanner jerked awake. It was warm, and he was lying on something more yielding than hard ground or a park bench, wrapped in clean blankets instead of his ratty old sleeping bag. The rich scent of coffee teased his nose, mingled with the incongruous slaughterhouse tang of blood. Couch. He was lying on a couch. In someone's living room. Tanner rolled over with practiced stealth, leaving the blankets heaped over his shoulders undisturbed, and surveyed the room through slitted lids: comfortable, lived-in furniture, slightly worn carpet in that ubiquitous shade of 70s harvest gold, walls adorned with family photos and a few pieces of quirky African-themed art. The clock on the VCR claimed it was after nine A.M., but the dimness of the room made it seem much earlier. A Christmas tree stood to one side of the unlit fireplace. It looked half-alive, literally--the tinsel-hung branches at the top of the tree were supple living boughs, and the base was wire and green plastic.

The Key and the White Witch were on their hands and knees in front of the empty fireplace, gazing up at the holiday aberration. They were engaged in setting up what looked like a small ceremonial altar on the hearthstone. The stained-glass glow of colored lights played across their faces, red and blue and green and amber. "It must have started after I went to bed last night," the witch said.

"What's it mean?" the Key asked, rolling nervous colt-eyes in Tanner's direction. She was a tall slim girl with long chestnut hair and clear blue eyes--pretty. One day soon she would be beautiful. And that was all. The bright-blazing corona of emerald power which had enveloped her was invisible to him now, and the loss left him so hollow that he almost wept. When you'd lived in a world of liquid madness for the better part of a year, surely it was best to wean yourself from delirium gradually. You couldn't just look back, recoil at who you'd been and what you'd done, and walk way as if none of it mattered any longer. It was almost a relief when the vampire ambled into the adjacent dining room and collapsed into a chair. His pale aquiline face looked ghastly in the jewel-toned shimmer of the tree lights, a comforting hedge against encroaching normality.

The White Witch stroked the nearest branch tenderly, as if she could touch its maker by proxy. "It means Willow hasn't got any magic to spare, and she's pulling it out of any non-essential spells."

Tanner tamped down budding panic. Were they just planning to hide, then? He had to convince them otherwise. He could hold sanity at bay just a little bit longer--he needed that last edge of madness to hone his purpose, because if he thought about it rationally the hopeless enormity of it all would smother him. He'd show them. They'd understand.

His clothes were nowhere in sight, but there was a stack of clean ones on the arm of the couch, and all his earthly belongings were piled neatly in a cardboard box on the nearby coffee table--the yellow rubber dog, the makeshift crosses, loose change folded in the wallet that wasn't his--all the pathetic odds and ends of charms he'd contrived to ward his nights and days. But where was...? The panic blossomed into full-blown terror. He lunged across the space between couch and table, scrabbling through the box with both hands, hunting wildly through the debris of his life. The couch-springs made a horrible _SPROING!_ as his weight shifted, and the vampire looked up at the noise, pinning Tanner to the couch with a bloodshot glare. "Oi, Slayer, your stray needs walkies!"

Tanner ignored him and kept searching. There it was, concealed under the pocket-rubble--his holy grail, the battered and dog-eared notebook. Tanner grabbed it and sagged against the table with a shuddering breath of relief. It was here. Safe. He subsided back into a jackstraw huddle of bony knees and elbows on the couch. He could feel the vampire's wintery gaze on the back of his neck as he examined the pile of clean clothes on the arm of the couch: paint-spattered Dockers, and a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt emblazoned with purple hibiscus. Chosen on the theory that even a madman wouldn't run away if it meant going out in public dressed like that, no doubt.

"Sorry. They're all we had that I thought might fit you." The White Witch sounded truly distressed about it. Tanner dropped the offending garment and summoned a smile.

"Beggars can't be choosers. Never thought I'd mean that literally."

She didn't look as if smiles were part of her repertoire at the moment, but she fashioned one for him anyway. "The bathroom's upstairs if you want to shower and change. If..."

"I can help you," he broke in, quick and awkward. He held out the notebook. "With this. And with your ward, if you want. I'm not much of a wizard, but..."

"That would be... sure." She took the ratty bundle of paper and paged through it, confusion wrinkling her fair brow. "Giles might... I'm afraid I don't..." She closed the notebook, handed it back to him and dropped to one knee beside the couch. The clear blue-grey of her eyes had gone cloudy. "Willow," she said. "Did you see her? Is she all right?"

"She was fine the last time I saw her. I gather things got exciting after I left the building." He shot another look at the vampire. It was staring at him--head cocked, dark brows knit over eyes full of inhuman hunger...but not for blood. Ravenous eyes, drinking in his grief and shame as if by sheer willpower it could force itself to a visceral understanding of remorse. Tanner fingered the regrettable yellow shirt, avoiding that disturbing gaze as he addressed its owner. "Last night. You saved my life. That's the second time you've... why?"

Heavy lids dropped over clear blue eyes, and a sardonic smile touched the perfectly sculpted lips for a second. "Sixty-four dollar question, innit? Would you believe that it seemed like the right thing to do at the time?"

Was the mockery in that voice for Tanner, or himself? "I've held your mind in my hands," Tanner whispered. The tendons of his fingers twitched with the memory. "It slipped through my fingers like black glass and fire."

"I'll take that as a no." The vampire settled back more comfortably into the chair, tucking his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans. "Well then--I like the fight. I love the Slayer. I get off on middle-aged poofs showering me with gratitude. Take your pick. Doesn't much matter, does it? Got the job done. Turnabout, mate--why'd you help Buffy?"

"The First's done with me. I'm no more use to it now it's got the Red Witch to play with." Tanner barely heard the small wounded catch in the White Witch's breath as the fury of betrayal rose within him again, along with a sardonic inner voice asking _Well, what did you expect? It's **evil.**_ "It owes me, and if I can't get what I bargained for I'll get revenge instead. The Slayer can help me get it." He laid a hand on the cover of the notebook. "It's all in here, and she can have it. And besides..." He squeezed his eyes shut, and the soft glow of the tree lights played over his closed lids. "It was the right thing to do. I...I used to do the right thing, once."

Head-tilt. "Yeh? What's it like?"

Tanner laughed, an incredulous chopped-off bark. "God, you _mean_ that! No wonder the Balance is fucked up. I envy the hell out of you, you know? No guilt, no remorse. I've got more chains than Marley's ghost dragging behind me--" _Pair after pair of eyes--terrified, trusting, confused, all of them melding together in madness as his hands plunged over and over into mind after mind, and he said the right words in the right order...and all for nothing, all in vain._ "You're free, and--"

In the time it took for Tanner to draw breath for the next word the vampire was across the room and leaning over the coffee table, spitting a curse as one hand brushed a pencil-and-rubber-band cross. Tanner could smell the blood on his breath, cool and rank like the draft from a meat locker. He threw himself against the back of the couch, but the vampire only bared white and perfectly human teeth in a mirthless grin. "Free? From what? Not like I can't feel guilt when I fuck up, you stupid berk. Just that I don't." He straightened, exchanging an inscrutable look with the witch. "Usually."

One word, the fulcrum upon which the universe teetered. The Slayer and the Watcher were in the room now, and the vampire retreated back to the dining room with an expression that suggested that the exercise wasn't helping his headache a bit. The Slayer stood with arms crossed, a cool and distant warrior-queen. "Mr. Tanner. I'd say we meet at last, but we've already met. You saved my life last night. Thank you."

Tanner hauled himself upright, clasping the notebook in his lap. "I..." God. What could he say to this woman, to any of them? "It was the day for it." He moistened his lips, feeling a terrible need to make her understand. "I'm sorry, you know. For all of it. But I was responsible for them. None of them could hold it together at all. They depended on me--Blondie and Jim and the Rabbit Guy. All of them. It seemed...I did the best I could. I never wanted--I tried..." He realized that his shoulders were shaking and his voice was threatening to run aground on a sob. They were waiting in ambush for him, every single one, hiding in the winter-bare groves of his memories, waiting to pounce. Men, women, young, old...minds he'd ravaged to feed the insatiable hunger of his own decaying brain and those of his ever-growing horde of followers.

The Slayer's cheeks went pink--angry, or embarrassed at his outburst? He couldn't tell. He looked at the Watcher. "You're Rupert Giles, right? You own the Magic Box."

"Part owner, as my partner would no doubt remind me were she here. Do I know you? Outside our current acquaintance, that is?"

"No. No...I've just been in the store once or twice." How mundane. Tanner pulled out a battered notebook. "Here. I...I thought perhaps this could help you." His voice sounded curiously hoarse in his own ears, as if too frequently left unused. The Watcher opened the notebook, skimming the first few pages with a frown and then proceeding more slowly through page upon page of cabalistic scrawls and elaborate diagrams with notes scribbled into every margin.

"I've been afraid to look at it," Tanner said. "Since...since waking up. Afraid it'll all be ravings and gibberish."

"Mmm." When in doubt, employ noncommital grunts. The Watcher skimmed another half-dozen paragraphs, puzzlement giving way to appalled fascination. He was turning pages swiftly now, glasses sliding unheeded down his nose as he flipped back and forth, comparing one crudely-drawn chart to another, double-checking the figures. "My God," he breathed, tracing the lines of one of the diagrams with a forefinger. He aimed a questioning look at Tanner. "A variation on Lieber's equations, if I'm not mistaken?" Tanner nodded. The Watcher reached the final few pages, composed entirely of closely-written notes, and looked up, face ashen. "This--this is astounding. Only a madman would attempt this. Er, no offense."

Tanner spread his hands. "None taken. As you say. But I give it to you, if you want it. My vengeance." He said the words lovingly, reverently; his benediction.

The vampire cocked an eyebrow. "You gonna translate for the crazy-talk impaired?"

"These..." The Watcher shook his head. "Well, some of it is completely mad. But this is a series of geomantic equations." He opened the book to an elaborate schematic of the water lines plotted against the street map of Sunnydale. "He's been charting the changes in the physical attributes of the town--traffic flow, new construction, ratios of distance and angles between existing landmarks, and so forth, in order to map the Hellmouth's fluctuating energy patterns. Which in turn yields a decent approximation of the shifts in the Balance and allows us to predict the Hellmouth's next major reversal. Which will be, and if it surprises you I despair of you on the spot, on the winter solstice." He looked at Tanner. "This is extraordinary."

Tanner smiled, almost shyly. "It was my job. I was a consulting geomancer for the Department of the Interior. Unofficially, of course. Before..."

"Glory?"

Tanner blinked, then laughed. "No, before I went on assignment to Haiti." He shrugged. He'd long since resigned himself to the disruption that particular event had wrought in his life. "When the loa decide that you're one of theirs, they don't take no for an answer. Glorificus came later."

The Slayer took the book, turning it this way and that and studying the diagram from several angles. "I don't get it," she said at last. "Nice to have a timetable for the next big flip-flop. We'll know to avoid picnics in the sewers that day. How does this help us fight the First?"

"In itself, not at all. It's what Mr. Tanner was planning to do when the er, 'big flip-flop' occurred," the Watcher replied.

Tanner nodded. "Get her into the Hellmouth. I wasn't sure how to do that, but you--you're the Slayer. You're strong enough to get her there at the right time."

The Slayer's face continued the model of incomprehension. The Watcher closed the notebook and re-adjusted his glasses. "Think about it, Buffy. The avatar of elemental chaos and evil, co-existing with the opening of a portal to a dimension of elemental order and good? Two equal and opposite forces, forced into such proximity--"

"Go boom," the Slayer finished, a glitter in her eye. The vampire sat up straighter, hangover forgotten at the cheery prospect of mass destruction. "Collateral damage? Exactly what boom factor are we talking, here?"

"The equivalent of a major earthquake, perhaps. We needn't worry about the universe winking out like a soap bubble."

"Oh, well, that makes it quite all right, then," the vampire muttered. "Safety first."

"Considering the fact that the dimensional walls are so weakened in this vicinity that if Willow succeeds in _her_ plan, the universe could well do just that," the Watcher said with some asperity, "Indeed, safety first." He considered for a moment. "Though really, I doubt the effects would spread beyond this solar system."

"That's why the Harbingers were arguing against it." Tanner rubbed his chin. The gesture didn't soothe him. "Not that they care if the town is destroyed, but they'd all be destroyed too, the First would lose its foothold in this dimension, and if you think the Balance is fucked up _now_... The First thinks the Red Witch will survive, and that's all it needs. It's willing to risk it."

"Willow surviving, of the good," the Slayer said. "Everyone else surviving too, of the very much better. And doing this Hellmouth thing would destroy the First? Because if we're going to lower property values for all of Sunnydale, I think it's not too much to ask that we destroy ultimate evil along with it."

"Destroy? I very much doubt it." The Watcher steepled his fingers. "But the very least, it would lose its vessel, its priests, and its ability to manifest in this corner of the multiverse for a time--perhaps a considerable time."

"And the losing its vessel part? You mean lose as in it's kicked out of Willow, leaving her unpossessed and normal again, right?"

The Watcher looked at Tanner, who shrugged.

The Slayer pursed her lips. "So basically I've got a choice between killing Willow before she possibly blows up the world trying to save it, and a totally untested plan created by a nutcase which will only _maybe_ kill Willow and definitely trash the whole town in the process?"

Everyone was silent for a moment, and Tanner held his breath. If they refused, he'd have to bear the weight alone again--there was no question of giving up now, but if he could pass the burden of his revenge to younger, stronger shoulders... "An admirable summation," said the Watcher.

"All right," the Slayer said. "Let's get to work. We've got a town to trash."

*****

"What do you mean you couldn't find it?" Willow demanded. "You went to 1630 Revello Drive, right? Because there's a Rivelle Drive on the other side of town, and sometimes the mailman--"

The two Harbingers crowded together in the doorway of the small side- cavern Willow had appropriated for her own use. Cot, desk, all the comforts of home--it was actually bigger than the dorm room she'd shared with Buffy their first year at college. The taller Harbinger cringed, and Willow suppressed her ire. No wonder Evil Overlords were always strangling minions with the Force or exploding them with blasts of hellfire; the toadying just begged for it. "Exalted Vessel, we went to the correct street. The Slayer's dwelling was not to be found."

"Not to be found how? Was there a bare foundation with pipes sticking up and a bathtub waving in mid-air? Exactly what did it not look like?"

The Harbingers exchanged creepy eyeless glances, at a loss for words. Not all of them had the lids sewn shut, Willow had observed. Some of them had weird symbols carved or branded into ruined flesh, comprising, perhaps, some demonic alphabet. At another time she'd have been eaten up with curiosity to decipher it. If she stood them all in a row and used her Scooby decoder ring... "We..er...we were simply unable to find it, Exalted Vessel."

...it would probably turn out to be a commercial for Ovaltine. They'd poked their eyes out, after all. Willow frowned at the Harbinger over the liquid-crystal screen of her laptop. "Never mind. Have the crazies been fed? Go take care of it."

Magic. Had to be. She'd felt the tentative scratching around the corners of her mind an hour ago. It wasn't an attack. Tara wanted to talk. Which was worse than an attack, because it had a much better chance of succeeding. She had a small army of Harbingers and a dozen human agents she could deploy to fight off any intruders bent on doing physical damage. They had a secure base here in the caverns, and after the debacle with Buffy sneaking in on Tuesday night, Willow'd spent the next twenty-four hours ensuring that the major tunnels leading into the main cavern were protected with illusions which would leave anyone attempting to infiltrate wandering in circles. In that time, Tara must have done something similar to Buffy's place.

It didn't matter. Tara was good, but no more than good. Her power was the steady glow of a hearthfire, not a blazing brilliant comet-flare, and Willow had no doubt that once she put her mind to it she could dispel whatever it was Tara had done. She had all the magic, all the muscle, and no reason to listen while they tried to talk her out of this. Willow resolutely ignored her lover's soft, insistent probing and murmured the cantrip which allowed her aetheric Web access.

Googling for _grimoires spellbooks heaven dimensions_ brought up one hundred and forty-seven entries; she scrolled down the list, noting the most promising links. Oddly enough, there were way fewer reference works on heaven dimensions than there were on hell dimensions. She supposed it made a kind of sense--most people who ended up in a heaven dimension probably weren't very motivated to come back and write memoirs. She clicked on the first link and for the dozenth time in the last forty-eight hours breathed a non-denominational prayer of gratitude for Project Gutenberg. Cut off from the Magic Box, Giles's private collection, and her own modest stash, she'd still managed to amass a basic occult reference library without ever leaving the caverns.

Another Harbinger entered with a silver tray, bowed extravagantly and extended its offerings towards her. "Exalted Vessel, I have traveled vast distances and endured great hardships to deliver to you the objects of your desire--tuna on rye, no pickles, and a cream soda. Is it to your liking?"

"Very good, Jeeves. Put it on the corner of the desk." The creature complied and backed out, salaaming, and Willow peeled back the waxed paper wrapping and took a bite. If there was one thing she could really get used to in this whole Evil Overlord business, it was the minions. She had Harbingers in charge of feeding, clothing, and cleaning up the crazies. She had Harbingers on the run fetching her the supplies she need for the upcoming rituals. She had Harbingers bringing her changes of clothes and setting up her office and fetching tuna sandwiches on rye, toasted, no pickles. True, she'd always imagined that when she achieved minions, it would be more in the role of a Professor McGonagall dispensing tart yet insightful advice to adoring students. Harbingers were a bit of a letdown... but still, minions! It was only a step from there to a corner office.

She pulled up Word while the new file was loading and double-checked the modified version of the crazy-curing spell. All it had required was a few tweaks to buffer Dawn's physical form from the flow of power, but of course Buffy wouldn't listen when she tried to explain. Willow pressed her lips together. She'd backed Buffy up through thick and thin for six years, and what thanks did she get? Big fat zilch, that was what, because she didn't happen to be a member of the back-from-the-dead club. Fine. It was Willow Rosenberg's turn to save the world now.

_ **"Everything humming along?"** _

Willow started, almost losing her internet connection. Her vampire self was sitting on the corner of the desk, swinging her heels and smirking. "Do you have to pop in and out like that?"

_**"Comes with the territory, Wills."**_ It leaned over and peeked at the file, incidentally displaying as much bustier-enhanced cleavage as possible. Willow edged away. It was just squicky when you came on to yourself. **_"How's our project going? Time's wasting."_**

Willow tapped a pen against her chin with a frown. Tanner's defection had been annoying, but not fatal. "There's been a slight setback, but I'm on it. You do your shape-changy-illusion thing and trick Dawn out of the house. Be someone she trusts, don't let her touch you, and as long as nobody else sees you not being there, we're made in the shade. There'll be a couple of the crazies with you to grab her if she makes a break for it."

_ **"I'm more concerned with the next stage."** _

Willow's frown deepened. "We've been over this. Killing them would just make them martyrs to the cause. They'd be all dead and inspiring and Balance-tipping." _Buy it, buy it, buy it..._

_**"Mmmm, yes. You painted a very convincing picture."**_ Vamp-Willow examined her perfectly manicured blood-red nails. _**"But somehow I still have all these nagging little doubts."**_

"I don't see why." Willow could feel the muscles tensing along her shoulders, rigidity creeping down her spine and out along all her limbs. There was no indication that this creature could read her thoughts, but somehow she couldn't feel sanguine. "It's simple. I send Buffy back, and while the portal's open I nab Spike's soul. Et voila, Buffy will be technically dead again, and the soul will mean that Spike's good-deed-doing won't count for a triple word score any longer. The Balance will be happy, the Hellmouth won't implode, and once everything's settled down I can bring Buffy back. Everybody's happy."

Vamp-Willow wriggled seductively. **_"Oooh, Tish, you spoke French. Sending the Slayer back to her eternal rest? Yummy. Bringing her back yet again, not so tasty. And your plans for Spikey..."_** Her alter ego made a moue. **_"Dull. Wouldn't you rather make him our very own puppy, with his very own collar and leash, and throw him the Slayer like a bone?"_** She-- _it_\--sucked on an index finger, a cat-smile playing across her lips. _**"He liked you before he liked her, you know. You could make him like you again. He'd be happier. You wouldn't force your puppy to walk on his hind legs. That's not what puppies do best."**_

Willow's spine went crawly at the thought of all those other spells in the nameless grimoire, the ones which clouded minds and bound souls still living. Not the simple blunt instrument of a spell of forgetting, but a precision tool for recreating a mind in whatever image one pleased. Of course, it was _harder_ to do mind-control spells on a vampire, but what a challenge! Except... she hit enter with more than necessary vigor. She didn't want vamp-on-a-rope. That was Buffy's gig. "What did getting a soul do to Angel?" she demanded. "Make him all hot to go out and fight that evil? No. He spent a hundred years moping and making exceptionally bad wardrobe choices. Why should Spike be any different? Already with the bad wardrobe choices--have you seen the jewelry? He's like an undead Huggy Bear."

_ **"Angelus's soul ends up in left luggage a lot."** _

"I'm working on that." There wasn't enough irony in the world-- _Horrors, Spike might lose his soul and stay sorta goodish!_ Willow tapped the file currently occupying her screen. "What's interesting? Angel's curse wasn't even part of the original Ritual of Restoration. If I can find or re-construct the older version of the spell there'll be no problems with Spike getting too cheery. And the sooner someone desists with the nagging and lets me get back to my research, the sooner I can reconstruct the original spell." She typed another set of search criteria into Google. "Besides, Spike pretty much handed his soul over to me to use in the spell to get Buffy back, so I figure I can do what I want with it."

Vamp-Willow's form shimmered and shifted, and Buffy lay along the edge of the desk--not right-now Buffy, but bouncy sixteen-year-old Buffy from the days when she'd had illusions and a figure. **_"Did he? Got it in writing, I hope?"_**

"Sorry. It was more of a handshake deal."

Mirror-Buffy rolled over and waved one sandaled toe in the air. **_"Soul-contracts pretty much extra-binding in any form, hmm? And the consequences for breakage..."_** A breathless pause; Willow couldn't quite interpret the expression on its face--was it threatening her with the consequences of breaking her own agreements again? Or...? It broke into a blinding smile. **_"I've changed my mind, Willow-wisp. Forward march on the soul-having of Our William. It'll be the kick."_** She giggled. _**"In fact, it'll be to die for."**_

*****

The dead man sat alone in a room in the Sunnydale Motor Hotel, unmoving, unbreathing, staring at the telephone. In the old days, telephones had been substantial hunks of metal. You could beat someone's brains in with one. This one was sleek and weightless, mocking in its insubstantiality.

Angel leaned forward and reached for the phone, hesitating over the grid of glowing numbers. Things would have been so much simpler had Giles been his ally in this. He could have proceeded openly then, no need for this elaborate subterfuge, but Giles had lost his edge with Buffy's second death. He'd seen it at the funeral; something vital had gone out of the Watcher, something beyond the ravages of grief. Giles had lost the closest thing he'd ever get to a daughter; now she was restored to him, and there was nothing the Watcher could bear to deny her... even if it led to something worse than her death in the end.

If you couldn't recruit one Watcher, another would have to do. He dialed the number Wesley had given him and waited through one, two, three tinny rings. The drive up from L.A. had provided plenty of opportunity to second-guess himself. The plan was too complex, part of him insisted, and relying on the Council for anything was insane. The other part countered that reliance didn't enter into the equation; they were a tool, and he was using them. Known flaws could be allowed for, and the Council possessed the knowledge and resources Buffy needed--even if they'd been strangely reluctant to employ them on her behalf before now.

The line picked up on the fourth ring, and a voice said, "Travers."

"Is your team in place yet?"

The other end of the line seethed with one of the most virulent silences he'd ever heard. "Angel," Travers said at last, oozing false jollity.

"Can't get anything past that Council training, can I?"

Muffled noises suggested that Travers was talking to someone off- stage. Deep suspicion colored the man's next words. "I didn't expect you'd be on site. Or are you still in Los Angeles?"

"I've been in Sunnydale for two days." Irritation put an edge on his voice; it wasn't easy to drop everything and rush to Buffy's rescue these days. He had a life, in a manner of speaking. "I don't have to remind you that this is an operation I take a very close, personal interest in, do I? Your last attempt at taking down a rogue Slayer was a little less than successful. I intend to ensure this one succeeds." _Remember, old man, I can make your job simpler--or impossible._

"The team is in place." He spat out a contact address as if it were poison. "They've been notified of your...interest in the case."

"Good. And Travers? I can smell your deceit through the wires. You know who I am and you know what I've done. I don't give a damn what you do with Spike once you have him, but as far as the Slayer's concerned, you will follow both the letter and the spirit of our agreement without fail...or you will be conscious for every minute of the six weeks it'll take you to die."

"I assure you, my word is as good as the man it's given to," Travers replied before Angel hung up on him. Travers would, of course, betray him. You used the tools at hand, he reminded himself. He lay back on the lumpy hotel bed, hands laced behind his head, and deliberately raised a vision of Spike in Buffy's room, in Buffy's bed, in Buffy's arms, before his mind's eye. _Jealousy?_ Angel probed his soul like a man prodding the socket of a sore tooth. Some, he had to admit, even now, when he could not for the unlife of him conceive of a way of fitting her into his world, nor of cramming himself back into the cramped confines of Sunnydale. He could acknowledge the emotion without letting it control his actions, knowing that it was irrelevant to what must be done--Buffy's liaison with Spike was an abomination because of what Spike was, not because of who either of them were.

He conjured the younger vampire's angular face, the defiant set of the chiseled jaw as he stared his grand-sire down: _I love her more than I hate you._ Even granting Spike had been telling the unvarnished truth as he saw it, Angel knew exactly what a vampire's love was--a dark, obsessive thing which couldn't help but defile its object in the end. Buffy might never thank him for this, but he didn't want her gratitude; he wanted to see her living the sunlit, happy life he'd imagined for her, the life that was the only thing which had made his leaving her bearable.

He should have just killed Spike, Angel thought for the thousandth time. Just done it, rammed the stake into his heart right in the middle of his confident speech about how Angel could never kill the ones he'd sired, and been done with it. Proved the cocky little twerp wrong, for once. Unfortunately, the cocky little twerp was right, on the surface of it at least; Angelus had spawned half a dozen monsters in his day, who'd spawned more in their turn. Of all of them, only mad Drusilla and her insolent get Spike still walked the world. The rest were dust and ash, yet when push came to shove, somehow it had always been another's hand wielding the stake. It wasn't pity or compassion that stayed him--Angel had none for the creatures that reminded him too painfully of what he was, and what he wasn't. It was simpler than that. He had always yearned for children, and the things he'd sired were as close as he would ever get. To destroy them was to destroy himself; to destroy Spike...

Was necessity, nothing more. He wouldn't allow himself to take pleasure in it. Buffy would hate him. That was a given. But Buffy had hated him before when he'd acted for her good. He knew all too well the sacrifices she'd be willing to make for a shadow-bound lover, and how long before Spike began to play on that willingness for his own ends? Without a breath, he rolled over and got to his feet. Time to go.

*****

"Next Saturday as in a week away, not two days from now, right?" Buffy tucked the phone under her ear and did mental math. That would be the twenty-second, and by that time the question of world endage would be moot, one way or another. It had been so long since she'd gone to any real Christmas parties...Mom had been sick last year, and making merry had been an effort of will. "Yep, I'm free that night. Should I bring something?"

Sandra's laughter rang through the line. "Just an appetite. I'll have enough leftovers of my own to foist off on people. And your boyfriend's welcome too, of course."

"Spike? Um... he's..." Buffy looked across to the dining room, where the subject of discussion was bent over a county surveyor's map of Sunnydale and environs spread out across the dining room table. Contrary to Giles's assertion, Spike was absolutely not spending all his time at her house. He'd gone home yesterday afternoon, and only come back half an hour ago. And she'd only seen him for a few hours last night for patrol and an unsuccessful attempt to find their way back into Willow's lair. Plus a little down time at the crypt afterwards, which so did not count, because crypt? Not her house. _Quod erat demonsomething._ "...free too, I guess."

"Well, bring him along. Anyone who puts Hallie in a snit is a pal of mine. We'll see you then."

"Sure." Buffy hung up, bemused. She was holed up in a spell-cloaked house with a vampire while her key-to-the-universe sister did make-up homework upstairs with a witch, and what upped the freakage quotient? An invitation to a Christmas party held by Anya's normal human friends. Or now, apparently, her normal human friends, a concept too alien to be examined closely just yet.

She pulled the living room curtains aside and stared out into the lengthening shadows. The Harbingers who'd swept through the neighborhood last night like deranged carolers had passed them by without a glance, so she had to trust that Tara's spell was working. She let the curtains fall back and rubbed her arms against a non-physical chill. Until they could come up with a way to lure Willow out from behind her own magical defenses... stalemate. Strategy wasn't nearly as satisfying as rushing in and busting heads.

At least it was almost dark, and in less than an hour she would be out patrolling, relieving her frustrations on the hordes of the undead. And anything else that happened to get in her way. Her hand hovered over the phone. Maybe she should call Giles and see if he and Tanner had made any progress refining the exact time when the Hellmouth would do its triple gainer, because who knew, maybe they'd miscalculated and it was tonight and...

Spike looked up, one eyebrow akimbo. "Not likely they've made a major breakthrough in the last fifteen minutes, pet."

Buffy snatched her hand away and stuck it behind her back. Sun not quite down yet. No pacing for Buffy, because pacing never did anything but wear out carpet. Buffy would instead do useful things like sharpening knives already honed to razor keenness, touching up nails already polished to gleaming perfection, and re-arranging things in cupboards which Tara would quietly put back in their original places tomorrow morning. She spotted a stack of envelopes. Aha. Useful Buffy would tackle the pile of Christmas cards to be addressed. She plopped down at the table across from Spike and ran down her mother's card list with growing mystification--the Finsters? The Aguileras? Who were all these people? Friends of her parents back in L.A.? Work contacts of her mother's? Well, stamps were expensive; they all got voted off the island. With gleeful abandon Buffy drew big fat Xs in red marker through three-quarters of the names on the list. She could accumulate her own stable of mystery names for future generations to ponder. One for Dad, one for Aunt Caroline, one for Cordelia because ex-Scooby even if she was a three-time gold medalist in the Bitca Olympics, one for--

She hesitated, shielding the next address with one hand and casting a furtive glance across the table. Spike's glasses were sliding down his nose again, inciting an irresistible desire to straighten them for him. His face seemed somehow more naked with them on, all his remnant humanity close to the surface and vulnerable. Maybe she should just address this one impersonally to Angel Investigations. No, that was silly. Spike had to get over his insecure jealous Angel thing. His and Giles's suspicions were completely unfounded, because Angel wouldn't... Just wouldn't. She could settle this immediately by calling him up and asking him about it--Angel was a lot more nocturnal than Spike, but he should be up by now. She could march right back over to the phone, dial the AI number, and ask him. And he'd answer.

And that was what she was afraid of.

Distraction good. My, my, wasn't that a yummy-looking vampire sitting across the table? She hopped to her feet again and bounced around the dining room table, draping her arms around Spike's shoulders and burrowing into his neck. "What's with the zen-like calm, Mr. Impatient? Are you on drugs? And can I have some?"

Spike disentangled her slightly and hitched his glasses higher on his nose, tapping his pen on the map. "All a facade, love; I'm distracting myself with shiny objects. Namely, lots and lots of presidential portraits." He indicated Clem's list of potential clients and the assorted demon lairs he'd marked off on the map. "Go after the Sluorn hide first, is what I'm thinking, after patrol tonight. Anya says it'll fetch the prettiest penny, and there's a whole colony of 'em up by the reservoir."

Buffy skimmed the notes Spike had added to each entry on the list-- whether the demon in question could be found in Sunnydale, and if so where; whether it would require a trip out of town; how much Anya would pay for the items on order and any other salvageable parts--and her eyes widened. One night of demon-hunting was going to net Spike as much as she could hope to earn in a week in sales or waitressing. This wasn't just grocery money. This was re-shingle the roof money. Maybe even, if it was steady, college fund for Dawn money. Horror of horrors, Anya had been right all along. "Math isn't my subject. Is that decimal point in the right place?"

Spike grinned, with one of those sly, sidelong looks that dared her to ask if he was joking or not. "Yeh. Had Mrs.-Harris-to-be double-check. Not quite what I could make knocking over ATMs, but it's a start."

The slippery slope was ever so much more slippy when cushioned by large amounts of cash at the bottom. Buffy worried her lower lip. "I suppose it would be overkill to have someone else along, um, overkilling-- I mean, we don't want the Sluorn to go the way of the buffalo, and who needs two Sluorn hides anyway? Especially at those prices."

Spike sat back and regarded her over the rims of his glasses with all the sultry appeal of a potential wage-earner. "If this little venture takes off, a partner might come in handy. I've got your back on patrol; wouldn't mind having someone a bit quicker to the mark than Clem to watch mine." His big square palm and long cool fingers enveloped her hand and his lips took on a small wicked corner-curl. "Love, I don't think you're cut out for a shop-girl."

"I'm not sure my future's in peddling demon guts, either, but--" The phone rang, and Buffy leaped for it with equal parts relief and apprehension. "Hello, Summers residence." Might be Giles, might be Angel, might be...

"Miss Summers," the voice on the phone said, "This is Darryl, from Oshman's personnel department. We've reviewed your application, and your recent interview was very impressive. If you're still available, you're hired. Your hours would be from two to ten, Wednesdays through Sundays."

"Two to ten?" Buffy asked, dismayed. In some ways that would work; she could push back patrol with no problem, and that would actually put her sleeping schedule in better sync with Spike's preferred hours, which should so not be a consideration... but she'd lose all her afternoon and weekend time with Dawn. "I'd hoped for--"

Darryl from Personnel made a small noise, the verbal equivalent of a sympathetic smile. "Yes, I realize that, but the shift we're hiring for is our late holiday hours. The job would last until January sixth, and it's very possible that you could be hired on permanently at the end of that period. We'd like you to start tomorrow."

"I--" She needed this job. She hated the whole idea of this job. Saving humanity was a cakewalk compared to placating an individual human who didn't want to listen when you told them the kitchen was out of the blue plate special. She could bring the perky; she'd done it before and could do it again and they really, really needed the money and why did Spike have to sit there waving that warm, juicy slice of forbidden fruit pie ala mode in front of her nose while Darryl offered her dehydrated fruit snacks? This was a normal job, a step on the road to the normal life she'd always wanted, right? Right?

"I'm afraid I've found something else." Buffy set the phone down, dizzy with freedom and terror. There would be other interviews, other jobs with better hours and better pay. Jobs that didn't require risking her life and manicure driving a knife through the horny carapace of a Sluorn demon in the dead of night. Jobs that didn't make her blood sing and her heart race or make her feel she'd accomplished something for the Sandras of the world when she fell exhausted into bed with the dawn. But until she found one...

Spike was watching her, eyes glinting behind the lenses of his glasses. Outside it was full dark, and up and down Revello Drive timers were flicking on and multicolored constellations blinked into existence, defining the darkness into roofs and trees and fences. Buffy glanced down at the list of X'd-out addresses, picked up a pen and added 'Sandra Murchison &amp; Family' to the bottom of the list. She reached across and plucked the glasses off Spike's nose, folded them up and tucked them in his shirt pocket. "C'mon. Let's go fight that evil."

*****

A block down the street, a motorcycle rumbled to life. A second later the bike tore past trailing a whirlwind of fallen leaves, the pale helmetless head of its rider bent low over the handlebars. Three figures rose from the shrubbery flanking the entrance to Restfield Cemetery as soon as the engine-noise faded.

"The target's laired in a crypt here," Collins said as they passed beneath the wrought-iron arch of the entrance. Angel had never forgotten that voice, though he'd only heard it once before, screaming orders over the din of helicopter blades. Now it was friendly. Unctuous. Ingratiating. Under no circumstances to be trusted. Obviously Travers had had a word with them, but Angel wasn't in any mood to assume it had been a good one. "Minimum of two entrances, one above-ground, one below. Keeps odd hours for a vampire. He's usually up and about by two or three in the afternoon and he's been seen round town in the mornings more than once. Spars with the Slayer the local magical supply store in the afternoons, then takes off on his own affairs for a few hours and meets up with her again around eight or nine in the evening. They patrol for two or three hours, sometimes hit the Bronze or the Alibi Room after, then go back to the Slayer's place or his crypt for a bit, and then one or the other of 'em goes home. At least, that was the pattern. Local gossip has it that in the last week he's started staying the night at her house."

"I've heard the local gossip too." Angel brushed the remains of the local gossip off the knee of his trousers. "Better the crypt than at Buffy's house; fewer witnesses, and none that'll care."

The cemetery was full of cold wind and rustling in the grass tonight. Collins rattled the handle of the crypt door and jumped back in surprise when it swung open with a creak. Weatherby grunted and took a firmer grip on his crossbow, eyes darting across the uneven ground from shadow to shadow, tombstone to tombstone. "Think it's a trap?" Unlike Collins, Weatherby wasn't making the pretense of cameraderie. Every word sounded as if it were being dragged out by main force.

"We saw him leave."

"Could've circled round, dropped into the sewers and come back in through the lower levels," Weatherby pointed out.

"Spike never did learn to guard his perimeter." Angel pushed forward and shoved the iron-bound door to, stalking into the dim interior of the crypt. He looked around--expressionless, but managing to convey contempt in the set of his shoulders. His nostrils dilated. "He's not here."

Spike's home was less of a sty than most vampire lairs. Fastidiously tidy, really, considering. He picked a couple of magazines off the nearest coffin-table and tossed them down again. _Penthouse_ and Caffiene, and God knew which Spike jerked off to. Scents of candle wax and cigarette smoke hung heavy on the still air, along with others barely perceptible to human noses: blood and whiskey, peanut butter and apples, old upholstery and sex, Willow and Xander...and strongest and most recently, Buffy. Underlying everything else, making his hackles rise, the familiar earthy scent of vampire. _Of the line of Aurelius, younger than he, but no fledgling._ Angel made an uneasy circuit through the eclectic mix of scavenged furniture and funerary marble, an old lion in the territory of an upstart cub grown to unexpected adulthood. _Family,_ the beast within him whispered. _Rival._

He had no inclination to listen to either prompt.

Weatherby and Collins followed him in, cautious despite the certainty that the crypt was empty. "Twenty-five years in the field," Weatherby muttered, shining his flashlight into corners. "Seen everything, I thought--and now we're taking charity from _him._ Reformed, Wyndam-Pryce says. Has a _soul._"

"You want to tackle the Slayer alone, you just say the word," Angel murmured, examining the layout of the upper level. They could hide behind the sarcophagus, but it wasn't a prime spot for an ambush. "But I seem to remember her taking your pal apart into his component atoms the last time you tried." He examined the smaller 'room,' which contained a battered mini-refrigerator plastered with photos and old grocery and to-do lists (why did Spike need three different kinds of olives?) Another sarcophagus had been pressed into service as a table-cum-counter, and a set of shelves containing an utterly prosaic assortment of dishes and dry goods lined the crypt wall. Angel opened the refrigerator and removed one of the Styrofoam containers (Kohlermann's Fine Meats, Serving Sunnydale Since 1947) and sniffed. Pig. Almost a disappointment.

Weatherby gestured to the ladder leading down to the lower level. Collins produced an unmarked spray bottle and spritzed it around a couple of times as they clambered down to the lower levels. Angel stopped inhaling; the spray would mask their scents when Spike arrived, but breathing it in would numb his own sense of smell.

The crypt's lower level was a series of caverns dug out haphazardly, one from the other, until they broke into one of the sewer tunnels. It was less tidy down here--clothes and books in more evidence, along with a CD player, a creaky-looking turntable, and a record collection which appeared to have been assembled from the dregs of six other people's discards. Layers of rugs lent an air of sybaritic decadence. Angel picked his way through the maze to the bedroom. One of the dresser drawers was open; it contained a small selection of blouses, slacks, and lacy underthings. Angel stood staring at it for a moment, then slammed it shut without further examination.

Weatherby and Collins followed in his wake, examining odds and ends of Spike's possessions with revulsion. "More places to hide in down here," Weatherby observed. He walked over to the bed and twitched the coverlet aside with a disgusted snort. "She's letting him do her, all right."

Bile rose in Angel's throat and he turned away, though not before catching a glimpse of the small brownish spots on the creamy expanse of sheet--left unchanged in token of Spike's conquest, probably. He hadn't wanted final confirmation that despite her denials, it had come to that. Spike would gloat over them, roll in them, reveling in Slayer's blood. A red surge of desire rose up in him to kill both men, that no one might ever know that Buffy had allowed herself to be so degraded--and it had to have been 'allowed;' Spike's chip would have prevented a real attack. Angel fought his rage down, hands clenched tight at his sides, and turned; Collins was checking the flash on his camera. "You don't need that."

"But we do," Collins replied, ever reasonable. "You seem to think that we're some kind of cloak and dagger operation, Mr. Angel, and I suppose that's understandable considering our previous misunderstanding with Wyndam-Pryce--"

"Double-cross," Angel corrected. Collins waved the distinction away.

"--but we can't just accuse Miss Summers of going rogue with no evidence. Slayers heal fast, and we need documentation. After all, at the moment we have no proof she's done anything with William the Bloody that she didn't do with... well, with you." He smiled, twisting the knife for all it was worth, and Angel reminded himself for the hundredth time that he needed these men for awhile longer. Collins held up the camera and feigned snapping a picture. "Don't worry. They won't end up on the front page of the _Mirror._ Her, ah, counselor will need to know the extent of her dependancy."

Angel gave him the flat-eyed, inhuman stare just long enough to make the man start to sweat, then nodded. It didn't matter, after all. They could videotape the whole operation if they liked, complete with director's commentary, for all the good it would do them.

A half-excavated niche concealed behind a bookshelf, where it looked as if Spike had given up a planned expansion after running into a tangle of tree roots, provided a hiding place for the humans. Weatherby readied both crossbow and anaesthetic dart gun for easy access. Collins applied the scent-masking spray liberally around the lower level and the two Watchers crammed themselves into the tiny space. Angel took up a separate station behind the wardrobe and didn't bother to remind the men that if he took the trouble to listen closely, Spike could hear the blood rushing in their veins. It made no difference to his own plans if they were discovered untimely.

The wait was interminable. The humans fidgeted and sighed and thumped in their dank corner, spending their mortal heat huddled against the raw earthen walls while Angel stood unmoving and immovable, dark and cold as the night around them. No satisfaction in this hunt. He didn't want to be here; he had cases to pursue at home--but how could he turn his back on her?

_You did it once before,_ a bitter internal voice reminded him. _Twice._

He wouldn't let himself hate Spike. That would give the other too much power. But he could hate that drawer filled with Buffy's silly, frothy underclothes, and all it implied. He could hate the fact that the last week had left his hard-won inner peace in bloody ribbons, hate the fact that he woke up in the middle of the day wondering--had he done the right thing, really, in leaving her? Or was Spike, damn his too-perceptive eyes, not entirely wrong in accusing him of taking the easy way out?

He caught the sounds in the tunnels long before the Watchers did, and tensed in anticipation. Two pairs of footsteps, carrying something heavy; two pairs of lungs working almost in unison--was it someone they weren't expecting...? No, only one heartbeat. Sometimes it seemed that Spike breathed just to piss him off.

There was a thump and a dragging scrape as the two of them dropped whatever it was they were carrying, and a moment later Buffy appeared in the irregular hole leading off into the tunnels, her nose wrinkling as it did when she'd just killed something particularly slimy. "Serious second thoughts about my future as a gut-peddler here. Next time, Spike? If a demon exudes unmentionable secretions, mention them!"

"Oh, come on, don't tell me you weren't enjoying yourself." Spike's pale head materialized out of the tunnel's gloom and he stepped over the makeshift threshold a pace or so behind her, axe balanced over one shoulder and coat flapping wetly against his knees. "Could see it in your eyes when we encountered that mud puddle." He grinned. "Explains why Sluorn hides fetch an arm and a leg; it's bloody near what you have to give up to get one."

Buffy sniffed. "Killing the Sluorn? Not a problem. Killing the Krallock demon when it showed up to object to us killing the Sluorn, marginally entertaining. Skinning the Sluorn and dragging its raw, stinky, drippy hide all the way back to town, beyond gross." Buffy brushed at the sleeves of her coat, making a futile attempt to remove some of the still-damp slime off the fun-fur trim. "Besides, who died and made you the expert on skinning things?"

"Love, don't ask me questions like that 'less you want to know the answer." He replaced the axe on the weapons rack beside the tunnel opening and followed Buffy into the bedroom. He struck a match from the bedside table and coaxed life into a candle or two, and shadows retreated to the corners of the room as the lttle spears of flame strengthened. "Would it appease the pouty lip if the profits go straight into your dry-cleaning bill?"

Behind his back, Buffy smiled and tossed her hair. "Maybe. The pouty lip can be pretty demanding."

"Have to put some thought into satisfying it, then." Spike shucked out of his duster and hung it on one corner of the wardrobe, where it began a morose drip-drip-drip on the floor. "Bright side, pet--least it didn't bowl you into the reservoir."

Buffy divested herself of her own coat and pulled a space heater attached to a long hunter-orange extension cord out from the corner of the room. She turned it on and sat down on the edge of the bed, holding her hands out over the grille and bouncing a little on the mattress. "I think the axe between the shoulder blades more than adequately expressed your displeasure. Or, as anyone not Giles might say, wicked cool move with the axe."

"You ripping its bowling arm out of its socket wasn't such a shoddy piece of work either." Spike pulled his sodden T-shirt over his head and balanced precariously on one foot to worry the knots out of his equally sodden bootlaces, and Buffy leaned back on the bed to take full advantage of the view. "Now let's just hope its mum doesn't show up at the Bronze tomorrow night wanting best two of three."

Neither of them gave any sign of noticing the Watchers concealed only a few yards away--Angel knew he'd have to concentrate to hear them if he didn't already know there were there, and Spike seemed safely preoccupied with other matters. Once or twice Buffy looked around with faint puzzlement in her eyes, her Slayer senses perhaps picking up some vagrant trace of vampire-other-than-Spike, but that was all. Should he feel it more or less keenly, Angel wondered, that she no longer had an infallible sense of his presence?

Spike kicked off his boots, peeled off his damp socks and jeans and stood naked in the expanding bubble of warm air around the space heater. He stretched, eyes closing in hedonistic bliss. Sheer vanity, maintaining that perfectly-muscled body, as a vampire's strength depended far more on the age and lineage of the animating demon than on the condition of the dead flesh it animated. The decades fell away and Angel was in another candlelit room, Darla at his side, the two of them watching with amused contempt as Drusilla fussed over her new toy. Drusilla had stripped the funeral suit from newly-risen and extremely confused William like a doll, dressing him for his first hunt.

It had been a good joke--the scrawny, hollow-chested young man, hung like a damn Percheron and obviously at a complete loss as to the proper employment of the largesse Nature had granted him. He'd cowered there, blanched and ludicrous as a plucked chicken, trying fruitlessly to conceal his growing erection as Drusilla's hands pinched and patted and flitted away again, her cruel, innocent sloe-eyes full of unspeakable promises. And then a sea-change: the tide of demonic lust and hunger, mated to perfection with the unleashed passion of his human host, rose in his eyes and William had smiled--that cheeky sex-on-a-stick grin which was the first harbinger of Spike to come, the same smile he was turning on Buffy right now--bent down, and kissed her.

A hundred and twenty years ago, Angelus had cuffed William's head very nearly off his shoulders for his presumption. He felt his fingers clenching and unclenching for a repeat performance.

Buffy was starfished on the sheets, the shoulder-straps of her top slipping negligently down her bare arms. Her face lacked the pallor and sunken eyes of the habitual suck junkie--if anything, she looked even better than she had last week in L.A. Glorious. Bright eyes and fetching grin and perky little nipples standing at attention beneath that flimsy pink cotton-knit top. No bite-marks visible, but that meant little in the face of the damning evidence on the sheets. Angel could imagine Spike's oily, coaxing wheedle all too easily. _Just this once, to show how much you love me. Felt good, didn't it? Once more can't hurt..._ And then fangs would sink into sweet flesh and that rich hot blood which was power incarnate would flow down his parched throat, filling him with new strength, and--Angel shook his head with a strangled gasp, driving the memories away. This had been a mistake. Perhaps time and circumstance had burnt out the blazing passion they'd shared, but God, he'd loved her once, and this was torture.

But it didn't seem that the quarry had the convenience of their observers in mind tonight. Spike took a silver-backed brush from the dresser nearby--old, real pig's bristle--but instead of settling in for a round of vampiric debauchery, the two of them curled together on the rumpled expanse of the bed. Buffy reclined against Spike's chest while he ran the brush through the sunlit fall of her hair, working out the fight-tangles for a full hundred long, sensual strokes. Now and again Buffy reached up to tease the snarls from Spike's damp unruly curls with her fingers. They discussed the fight with the Krallock demon. And Christmas shopping. And some mysterious problem with Willow, all in cryptic verbal couple-shorthand, all while Spike played with the shining waves of her hair, fanning the tawny silk across her shoulders.

The mutual grooming session was revolting enough, but none of it was what the Watchers had come for. Until Buffy took the brush away and rolled Spike over. There was an assurance to her movements, an alien and ferocious grace, a wantonness which both aroused and terrified--everything Angel had seen and wondered at outside the restaurant last week, grown deeper and more intense. Her hazel eyes were half-lidded and misty, the wide mouth that was so firm and determined on the hunt gone soft and giving. They were nested in the heap of pillows now, nose to nose, belly to belly, kissing. Just kissing.

Kisses that took their time, kisses that knew they'd get there eventually. Meandering kisses, nibbling their way across the translucent delicacy of eyelids and earlobes, trailing down the smooth ivory slopes of throat and jaw. Small sharp Buffy-teeth grazing Spike's Adam's apple just _so_, drawing low exquisite moans. Feather-lipped kisses, chaste in their hesitancy. Long, deep tongue-kisses, smoky and molasses-sweet, dark and warm and languorous. Buffy whimpered as Spike slipped into game face, pressing closer, tongue thrusting hard into his fangs. Buffy's hands slid up his torso, hands drawing lazy circles over the muscles of his back and sides as both their bodies thrummed to Spike's resonant growl. Her head tipped back, her throat bared, ecstacy in her eyes as the ivory scimitars descended...

Actinic light painted the room in stark black and white as Collins's flash went off, and a near-inaudible _pfft_ of air marked the discharge of Weatherby's dart gun. Angel was in motion even as the flash faded.

He'd been wrong. Destroying Spike was going to be a pleasure, after all.


	33. Chapter 33

He'd come to know the sounds she made as intimately as he knew the contours of her body, or the changing shades of her eyes. Throaty murmurs of content, kitten-mews of pleasure and mouse-squeaks of surprise, excited whimpers and lusty screams--all music to his ears, a rhapsody in B, and--

"Ow!"

"Love?" Spike dropped out of game face immediately and pulled away from Buffy's throat. He hadn't accidentally broken skin, had he? 'Ow!' wasn't part of the program tonight. Buffy didn't answer. She was staring over his shoulder, widening ripples of surprise in her sea-colored eyes. One hand fumbled at her bare shoulder, and came away holding a small red-fletched dart. Her lips parted, releasing a small sigh, and her lashes fluttered once--then her eyes rolled back, her head lolled to one side, and her hand fell limp to the pillows.

Spike rolled over, putting himself between her and the rest of the room in time to see Angel--_Angel?!_\--barreling straight at him, eyes a hell-bright blaze of gold in his normally impassive slab of a face. Spike whipped round, scooped Buffy up, and flung her across the width of the bed. She tumbled off the edge in a Maypole flutter of blankets and hit the floor with a loose-limbed thump. "Sorry, pet!" Inelegant, but it got her out of the oncoming behemoth's path.

A second later Angel's fists were driving into his face. Ears ringing, Spike twisted and kicked, his bare heel slamming into his grand-sire's jaw. The larger vampire grunted, one foot slipping on layers of rugs as the blow took the momentum from his charge, and collided with the bed. Angel rose with a bull-shake of his head, blood and slaver flying from his wounded mouth. His hand shot out and closed on Spike's ankle. The mattress yawed under their combined weights; Spike overbalanced and Angel hauled him across the bed in a tangle of sheets. "What the bloody fuck crawled up your arse and died, you colossal pillock?" Spike yelled. "You wanted a few pointers, all you had to do was ask!"

Angel ignored him, clamping another ham-like hand around his calf. Across the room a bookshelf toppled over, spewing its contents in a chaotic swath across the carpet--_Fuck, I just got all that crap off the floor!_ and revealing two strange men crouched in the crevice behind it, crossbow and pistol at the ready. Why the hell hadn't he scented them? Spike plunged and fought against Angel's grip, scrabbling for purchase amidst the sheets, Santiago's swordfish caught in the inexorable pull of the line. His fingers met something cold and hard--hairbrush. He doubled back on his own length and smacked the back of the brush full-strength across his opponent's nose. Angel howled, but didn't let go; he heaved Spike into the air and tossed him half-way across the bedroom. Spike crashed into the dresser, collapsed to the ground and scrambled to his feet, brandishing the hairbrush with a wild-eyed snarl. That tied it; he was going to have to kill the lot of them. If word of this fight ever got out he'd perish from sheer embarrassment. "What do you want? Minions didn't used to be your style."

"Step aside, Spike." Angel spoke as if Spike's questions were irrelevant. "I'm here for Buffy. You're just in the way."

"I wouldn't say that's entirely correct," one of the men by the bookshelf said. "I believe we do have some minor business to conduct with Master William."

The soft deadly snick of the crossbow cocking filled the air behind him. Fuck, fuck, a thousand times fuck; Angel was between him and Buffy's drugged and helpless form, and fast as he was, he wasn't quite close enough to the humans to be certain of turning and disarming the man in time. Outnumbered three to one, wielding a hairbrush against a gun and a crossbow while his delicates flapped in the breeze...not exactly a position of strength. Have to do something about that. Spike let the brush fall to his side, straightened into an insolent damn-I'm-stunningly-well-endowed lounge, and cocked a thumb at his dresser. "Mind if I slip into something less comfortable, Peaches? You've gone and lost your romantic nature living in Lotusville. Time was when you took a fancy to knock a bloke around you'd spring for dinner first."

An infinitesimal flicker of irritation showed in the slight lowering of Angel's brow. "Go ahead."

Shoulder blades prickling in anticipation, Spike bent and pulled open the lowest dresser drawer, taking advantage of the opportunity to sneak a look in the direction of the bookshelf and mark the exact position of the two humans. They'd stepped out from the little niche behind the shelf, and were standing ankle deep in Sunnydale Public Library discards about eight feet behind him. Heartbeats even, hands steady on their respective triggers. Professionals. He skinned into a dry pair of jeans, taking his time with the buttons and maneuvering himself a little closer to the men in the process. Angel working with a pair of Council wankers--there had to be weaknesses in this little alliance he could exploit. They hadn't tried to dust him outright, so Travers must still want him unalive and kicking. Probably figured him for an easy catch, what with the chip. "Didn't expect to see you here," he said, still addressing Angel. "Thought you'd leave her a few illusions. Rupert sussed out that you'd gone telling tales out of school, but Buffy didn't believe it of you."

The creases at the corners of Angel's mouth deepened in disgust. "The last thing Buffy needs is more illusions."

"Yeh, well..." Spike pulled a clean shirt from another drawer and tugged it over his head. Keep up the rhythm and maybe he could go so far as to get his boots on. "I'd be more convinced of your tender concern if your gunsels here hadn't just shot her full of horse tranquilizers. What exactly was it they were planning for that Faith bird of yours again? Something she'd rather do five to ten to avoid? Kill 'er off, you think, and make a new Slayer, or just run experiments?"

Another unreadable flicker in those dark eyes. Absolutely maddening. In a century of poking and prodding he'd never truly managed to penetrate that implacable reserve. Angel folded his arms across his massive chest and shifted his weight, a faint smile touching his lips. "Mr. Weatherby is a registered nurse, as it happens, and Mr. Collins has a set of voluntary commitment papers--signed--in case you'd like to examine them. Buffy's decided that in light of the disturbing behavior--that would be you, Spike--she's displayed in the wake of her traumatic head injury last spring, she needs a thorough medical and psychological evaluation. Her sister will of course be provided for by the Council in the meantime."

Spike stared at him, gobsmacked. Had Angel lost the plot entirely, driven round the bend by progressive hair gel poisoning? "You think her friends'll believe that? Like hell. You can dust me, maybe. What's the plan for Rupert? Gonna take him out too? Yeh, that's not suspicious at all." He searched the other vampire's expression for clues--was that a hint of uncertainty? Oh, yeah, work that sodding conscience, soul boy. "Tweedledee and Tweedledum here don't come off too keen on helping out," he ventured, with a jerk of his chin at the men beside the bookcase. The one with the crossbow--Weatherby--tensed. Hah. "That because they're tender of puncturing your hide, or because they don't care if I do?" He flashed a knowing smirk at the humans. "Or maybe they know you're planning on a double-cross of your own. They're bright chaps, those Watchers." He quirked an eyebrow at Weatherby and let the smirk widen to a grin. "Funny how it works out, innit? He's on that side of the room with the Slayer, and you're on this side of the room with me."

Paydirt. Hatred sparked Weatherby's dull eyes to momentary brilliance, and his finger tightened on the trigger. His partner laid a calming hand on his shoulder. "I'll give you an A for effort," Collins said with a genial nod, "but we know all about the chip. And entertaining as this has been, we've a plane to catch, so--"

"Know all about the chip, do you?" Spike purred, gauging the depth of the loathing in Weatherby's white-rimmed eyes. "Angelus here tell you the latest, then? Chip's not working any longer." He morphed into vamp-face. "And I'm _famished._"

Weatherby's bony features contorted with fury and betrayal, and his attention wavered between Spike and Angel--only for a second, but a second was all Spike needed. He launched himself at the Watchers with a roar. The crossbow twanged and the bolt buried itself in his shoulder, punching a searing line of pain through bone and tendon. Spike staggered, recovered, tore the weapon out of Weatherby's hands as the human frantically cranked it back for another shot, and flung it across the room. The crossbow pinwheeled through the air to smash into the opposite wall. Collins's pistol went off with an ear-splitting crack and Spike doubled over as a swarm of fiery wasps grazed his ribs and ripped through the muscles of his side.

Angel vaulted across the bed the moment the crossbow fired, landing panther-light for all his bulk beside Buffy's unconscious body. Spike surged to his feet and head-butted Collins in the gut. Collins toppled over backwards, howling as his spine came into forcible contact with the solid oak of the fallen bookshelf. Weatherby pulled a knife and Spike kicked it out of his hand, ignoring the pain that stitched through his side. A quick glance downwards revealed half a dozen tiny shards of wood embedded in mangled flesh. He'd completely discounted the pistol, but it must have been modified to shoot wooden slugs; the soft projectile had shattered against bone and mushroomed into deadly fragments. Sheer luck it hadn't come nearer the heart.

Without a glance at his Council associates, Angel swept the Slayer into his arms, and, to Spike's stunned surprise, raced for the tunnel opening. Bloody hell, the old bastard _had_ been planning a double-cross all along! Collins was trying to get up; Spike stamped hard on his ankle and was rewarded with a satisfying crack. That one wouldn't be going anywhere soon. He grabbed Weatherby and spun him around, wrenching the man's arm up behind his back. "ANGEL!" he roared. He yanked Weatherby's head down, baring the man's ill-shaven and unappetizing neck. "Bring her back or I swear I'll tear his sodding throat out!"

Halfway down the shadowy corridor, Angel paused, his expression as enigmatic as always. "The way I figure it, Spike, either you're bluffing, or you're not. Either way, you lose."

He was gone in a whirl of black leather. "Bugger!" Spike bashed Weatherby's head into the nearest bedpost for insurance and tossed the man aside. He rammed his feet into his boots--bastards were still wet, and there wasn't time to root his Docs out from under the bed. He yanked the crossbow bolt from his shoulder with a pained hiss and took off after his vanished grandsire, bootlaces whipping around his ankles. He passed the landing where he and Buffy had left the bundled Sluorn hide (still propped against the tiled wall, draining salt slurry into the effluent) and skidded round a corner. His left foot came down on an untied right lace, and next thing he knew he was arse over tit against the wall. All but screaming in frustration, he doubled over and tied his laces with shaking fingers. He was off again within minutes, but he knew exactly how fast a vampire could move and any time lost was too much. He pulled up short at an intersection, realizing to his dismay that he couldn't pick up either Angel's or Buffy's scent beneath the stink of the sewer. It wasn't just that the Watchers back at the crypt were masking their scents somehow; they'd done something that left his sense of smell no better than a living human's.

He schooled himself to stillness and listened. The gurgle of the sewer mingled with the agonized groans of the wounded Collins and the distant squeak of rats. Angel knew these tunnels as well as he did, and was moving as silently as their kind knew how. Spike caught a faint muffled thumping to the left and raced off down the left-hand fork; if he'd chosen correctly, he should be able to catch up to his burdened quarry within a few blocks.

But his luck was no lady tonight. The thumping turned out to be one of Buffy's ridiculously high-heeled boots tied to a sewer grate, banging against the metal bars in the flow of the current. Spike ripped it free with a curse and retraced his steps, but by now Angel had a hopeless lead. He halted in the middle of the intersection, legs trembling and chest heaving. The flow of blood from both wounds, sluggish though it was, was starting to make him dizzy, and his side ached with every breath. _Well, stop breathing then, you great git!_ Despite the pain, the ebb and flow of air in his lungs steadied his nerves--it was half the reason he'd taken up smoking all those years ago, just to have an excuse to breathe. Spike inhaled and held the breath longer than humanly possible, let it out even more slowly. Running mad through the tunnels wouldn't get Buffy back. Information might. His eyes narrowed to golden slits, and his head swung back in the direction of the crypt. Deep in his chest a low chain-saw rumble began building momentum.

Someone was about to have a very unpleasant evening.

*****

The last time he'd held Buffy had been an awkward good-bye hug outside the diner where they'd met after her resurrection. She'd been lost in his arms, a wispy leaf-skeleton of a girl. She felt more substantial now, but she was still a very slight burden indeed. Angel removed her remaining shoe and laid her out in the circle of lamplight on the bed. Seeing her there produced an unexpected frisson of deja vu. In just such a seedy pest-hole as this had he held Darla in the last precious moments of her restored life, before Drusilla had stolen that life and her soul for the second time.

He should have realized what was happening to Buffy at that first meeting, before the first courtesy sip of indifferent coffee. He'd watched Darla go through much the same gamut of apathy, detachment, and desperation when Wolfram and Hart brought her back. Neither woman, he suspected, would find the comparison flattering. Angel's eyes fell shut for a moment, the hopelessness and failure of last year threatening to overwhelm him. It wouldn't happen a second time.

He sat down in the room's single chair and regarded Buffy's sleeping face. It wasn't peaceful; her brows were knit, her mouth drawn tight. She lay curled beneath the threadbare hotel blanket, her body curved like a half-drawn bow, one arm extended in a search for something, or someone. Strands of hair twined like ivy around the slender column of her throat, gathered where her chin tucked into the angle of her shoulder. No wound there, thankfully; the interruption had come before things could go too far, and by now even the faint indentations in the skin left by the points of Spike's fangs had faded. He'd resisted the temptation to check for bite-marks in less obvious spots.

Travers's private line picked up on the first ring. It was a more reasonable time of the morning in London now, of course. "There's been a slight change in plans," Angel said, leaning back against the wall. The chair-back scraped against old plaster. "The chip's not working."

There was a brief, bristling silence on Travers's part. "How very convenient," he said with well-bred bile. "I suppose you're going to tell me they got away? And that you need something else in order to pursue them? Money? Information?"

"Travers, you have nothing I could possibly want. Buffy's here with me. I left your men fighting Spike--"

"You mean to say you abandoned them to that monster?"

"My priority is Buffy's safety, Mr. Travers. It never occurred to me that two highly-trained Council field agents wouldn't be capable of handling a single vampire." Not quite the truth; he'd felt an uneasy twinge of conscience about leaving Collins and Weatherby to Spike's not-so-tender mercies, but only a twinge. After the way they'd handled Faith's case a few years back he couldn't muster much sympathy for their plight.

Travers grumbled, but he couldn't very well argue without casting aspersions on his own men. "Very well, then--bring Miss Summers to the rendezvous point as planned, and we'll send a--"

"That's what I meant about a change of plans." Angel stretched his legs out across the gap between chair and the foot of the bed and propped his heels up on the worn chenille bedspread. In a way the unexpected failure of Spike's chip had simplified matters. "Spike was to be your guarantee of Buffy's cooperation. Until we know for certain that your people have him in captivity, I'm thinking it would be better all around if Buffy stays here in the States where I can keep an eye on her."

He hung up on the fulminating Travers--it was getting to be a ritual--and set the phone aside, settling down to his vigil over Buffy's drugged slumber. Travers would doubtless try to contact Weatherby and Collins now. He wondered idly if they were dead, or if they'd managed to turn the tables and subdue Spike. He should care about the outcome, he knew, just as he should have cared that not everyone at Holland Manners's dinner party was irredeemably evil...but it all seemed academic. Weatherby's violent hatred of vampires resulting in Spike's untimely dusting would be the ideal outcome of this operation, but Weatherby's untimely death at Spike's fangs had possibilities, too. He'd spun that line of bullshit about having Buffy committed mainly for Collins's benefit, but if it made Spike angry enough to shatter his pose of humanity, so much the better.

He left the room once, just before dawn, to walk down to the soda machine beside the pool. While the ancient machine hummed and clanked preparatory to spitting out a Diet Coke, Angel gazed through the fence at the hollow of eggshell-blue concrete, drained for the winter and locked up now. Soggy drifts of dead mulberry leaves encrusted the cracked bottom. If Drusilla were here, perhaps her eyes could read the abandoned pool like a giant's teacup, discovering therein auguries for the coming year. Better she wasn't. The future had never done him any favors.

The can dropped into the hopper with a clunk and Angel picked it up. He walked back to the small dingy room with its cheap anonymous furniture and set it on the nightstand beside the bed. Buffy stirred beneath the sheets as if the weight of his gaze had reached her in the depths of sleep. "Spike?"

It hurt, a little, that it wasn't his name she murmured, but who had he to blame for that? Spike's words of a week past ate at him--_She's with me because you let her go._ If he'd spent the last two years hunting for a way to remove the curse instead of submitting to it...but he hadn't. It had never even occurred to him to try. "It's me. You're safe." He reached across the bed to smooth the hair from her eyes. "How are you feeling?"

Buffy's hand went to her shoulder, fingers pressing out the residual ache of the dart. "Someone shot me." She blinked up at the flyspecked globe of the ceiling light with a muzzy frown. "And then glued my eyelids together, possibly after raising a small family of pigeons in my mouth." She sat up, wincing a little, and he could tell she was evaluating the stiffness in her limbs, assessing her readiness for a fight. She looked around, still frowning, and then a flare of panic burned the fog from her eyes. "Spike!" She flipped the blankets aside and jumped to her feet. "Where's Spike? Did you see him? How long have I been out?"

"Spike's fine. Or he was the last time I saw him. It's eight o'clock on Friday morning, and you've been asleep for about four hours. You want something to drink?" Angel gestured at the Coke. "I got diet."

"Thanks." She took the can and gulped half of it. "Travers's people shot me, right? If you haven't already done it, call Giles and let him know what's up. Erk, I'm a mess--is my purse around here somewhere? And what happened to my left shoe?"

"It's probably back at the crypt. Buffy--"

"Never mind, big tough Slayer here, I can go barefoot for a few hours." She was already bent over the rust-stained bathroom sink, splashing water on her face and straightening wrinkled clothing. "And you said Spike was where, again?" She rubbed her upper arms, shivering--was the room that cold? He had trouble, sometimes, remembering exactly what the comfort zone for humans was.

"Buffy, we need to talk."

"Do you have any idea of the amount of trouble Spike can get himself into in four hours?" Catching his expression, she amended, "Silly question. Did you bring any weapons? If not, we'll have to hit my place and grab some before going after Spike." She cast a dubious look at the bed. "That blanket's kind of flimsy; can you make it to the sewers OK?"

"Buffy!" He strode across the room, seized her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him; after a second of instinctive resistance she relaxed in his grip. "Listen to me. Spike's in no immediate danger. Travers's men had orders to take him alive, or as close as he gets to it." With any luck, they'd violated those orders in self-defense.

"Alive? Then--" Dark-lashed Margaret Keane eyes gazed up at him with wounded betrayal--the look she'd had that day in the tunnels, when he'd told her he was leaving, and on the day she'd walked in on him cradling Faith in his arms. "How do you know--?" Her mouth firmed against the quiver of her chin. "You...you did tell Travers about Spike and me, didn't you?"

"Yes, I talked to Travers." He hated that look. It was a carpet knife unhooking his vitals and maybe he'd deserved it the first time, but this time she had no right to it. "I tried talking to Giles, but he's so terrified of hurting your feelings by taking the knife away he's willing to let you cut your own throat with it. The Council was going to find out about you and Spike sooner or later. This was the only way to be certain of keeping you safe, to work from the inside." She wasn't thawing, and Angel's hands fell from her rigid shoulders and dropped to his sides in frustration. "I told Travers I'd help him capture Spike and bring you in, at a price, and that price was a guarantee of your health and safety. They had enough trouble with Faith that he was willing to agree."

"And you trusted Travers?" Buffy asked, incredulous. She stood bowstring-taut on the worn carpet, fists clenched until the tendons stood out in the backs of her thin hands, and for a moment Angel thought she was going to strike him. "You had no _right._"

"Right?" Resentment flared; Buffy never had trouble justifying her own I-am-the-Slayer decisions, but let anyone else dare-- "No. I had an obligation. Suppose you found out Xander was sleeping with Drusilla--what would you do?" Something in the set of her shoulders made him break off, appalled. "You didn't think I'd just hand you over to them and leave you there, did you?"

"I thought--" Her voice cracked and then the shell of stony reserve was back full-force. "If you weren't planning to hand me over to the Council, what were you planning to do?"

"Get you away from Spike. Play it by ear. The Council has people who _could_ help you, with the right pressure applied. Travers thinks you're out of control. I wouldn't go that far, but Buffy, you're heading there. I could see it last weekend. I saw it tonight. It's not just that you're crawling all over Spike. Slaying used to be a sacred calling for you--now it's a game, or something to make money on. Or, God help us, foreplay." He wanted her to hear concern and compassion, and feared it would sound like pity or condemnation. "You...you _inspired_ me, once. You were a hero. And now...you're selling advertising space on your stakes."

Buffy's chin went up and her eyes chilled to wintry grey. Her gaze fell on the little cluster of glasses sitting on the counter by the sink, each in their wrapping of sanitized-for-your-protection paper, as if she would very much have liked to throw one. "You know what? The electric company is oddly indifferent to the number of times I've saved the world." She settled for picking up the remainder of her Coke and running her finger around the rim. "You think I'm thrilled by the idea of spending my whole life killing yuckies? I want a day job that actually, you know, occurs in the daytime--but I'm a college drop-out with zero marketable skills, and until I can get a degree or find something good that doesn't need one, I man a cash register or flip burgers. Or I kill very expensive demons. The ever-growing list of Summers creditors are casting their highly influential votes for the demons. But I do not, I will not make money on slaying, Mr. Kettle with the supernatural detective agency! Spike's paying gig and the slaying, totally separate issues. They both just happen to involve killing things with defective fashion sense."

Angel sighed. "Buffy, this is about you, not Spike. After you told me what you'd been feeling since coming back, I asked Wesley if there were any clues in the Scroll of Aberjian that might give us an idea what caused it. Wesley has access to the entire text of the scroll, not just the spell Willow copied--Anatole's commentary explains a lot." He ran a hand through his hair, searching for words. "The Raising spell pulls all the pieces together. Body, soul, memories....even if some of them are missing or destroyed. Darla even got the memories of her existence as a vampire, though the demon wasn't part of her resurrected self." It had haunted Darla in those last few days, the question of who, precisely, she was now. The possibility that the clean lines of demarcation he'd drawn between man and monster could blur had haunted him too, and his dreams had been filled with uneasy visions of Angel and Angelus, reflecting one another into hazy infinity. "But it doesn't connect them. Darla--and you--felt disconnected because you _were_ disconnected. From the world. From yourself. If you're lucky, the pieces eventually start to click together again. If you're not lucky...you could go on like that, for years. Numb. Not dead, but not really alive."

He'd seldom seen Buffy Summers truly afraid, but in this moment her eyes held a crawling horror that said _Anything but that._ She banished the look with a shake of her head and took a half-step forward, facing down the intangible. "Well, that's...mind-numbingly terrifying. But this justifies you ratting me out to Travers how, exactly? I'm getting better, Angel. Big-time clickage."

"There's no guarantee the pieces will fall back into exactly the same pattern they held before you died. Outside influences could...disrupt things." He sank down on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumping, and tried to ignore the headache which was beginning to chip away at the back of his eyelids. "Travers claims it's a constant struggle for older Slayers to control certain...darker urges...as their power increases. Before your death it was a struggle you were winning hands down. Now you're not even trying." He looked up, eyes bleak. "How long has Spike been feeding from you?"

"_What?_" Buffy choked, spraying Diet Coke across the bedspread. "I told you before--he's never--were you _watching_\--that was just playing!"

"I don't need a diagram to tell when Spike's fed on Slayer's blood," Angel snapped. "I was there for his first Slayer kill, remember? I know the look."

"Your Slaydar's gone wonky, then." Buffy flung out both bare unmarked arms. "Do I look like Spike's been feeding on me? Do you think I could hide it if he was? Real-life vamp bites aren't cute little pinpricks, they're great big nasty chomp marks, as I ought to know having survived three of them, and I think I'd notice if--oh. _Oh._" Her tirade devolved into an embarrassed mumble. "There may have been some...exchange of bodily fluids--but not by biting! And so not your business!"

"Spike drinking your blood isn't my business?"

"Angel," Buffy said through gritted teeth, "Breathe."

Caught by surprise, he inhaled, not the superficial intake of air he needed for talking, but a deep, real breath--the kind he avoided taking around her if at all possible. Seeing her was bad enough. Buffy's essence flooded his senses, warm and female and...very recently off her courses. Oh, God. "Get it? Buffy is a No Biting zone, and we will never, ever discuss this subject again, capisce? Look, I've got to go. Spike could be in trouble and Willow's gone all Dark Phoenix on us and the First Evil is back in town and I just don't have time for this...this guy stuff. You and Spike can have your pissing contest after the apocalypse, 'kay?"

"Time?" Angel was on his feet in an inchoate haze of fury, looming between her and the door. "Do you think _I_ have time to put my entire life on hold and race down here to pull you out of a briar patch that you of all people knew better than to jump into in the first place? Well, let me enlighten you--I don't! Gunn's barely speaking to me since his pals went on that demon-killing spree, Lorne's sobbing in his Sea Breeze because his bar's been trashed yet again, Wesley's a wreck since he nearly took an axe to Fred and the Tro-Clon is coming--and what's that, you ask? I don't know, but what do you wanna bet it's not good? I have apocalypses of my own to deal with, but here I am! That's what you want, isn't it? Someone to be all about you, all the time? The difference is, Spike does what he thinks will make you happy. I'll do what I think is right, no matter how much it hurts!"

She flinched as if he'd slapped her. "_You're_ hurt? Excuse me? I'm the one with a bullseye on my derriere, and Spike may be--"

"Good riddance if he is! Whatever darkness lies in you, he draws to the surface. Before I loved you I admired you. You made me want to be a better man." He wasn't going to cry; tears were for boys, for women, for pansy-ass ex-poets. A man might weep upon release from hell, but on all lesser occasions he stayed in control of his emotions. She'd seen more of his tears over the years than anyone, living or dead. "I can't stand by and watch you drown in him!"

"For someone so damn inspiring," she whispered, "You don't trust me much, Angel. Did you ever think that maybe instead of drowning in each other, we'd both learn to swim?"

Angel turned away, not because he couldn't meet her eyes but because he didn't want her to see the turmoil in his. "There are some tides the strongest swimmer in the world can't fight." He'd always been the adult in their relationship, the rock which weathered her emotional storms. It had been second nature to conceal things from her--that he was a vampire, that Darla was his sire, that Drusilla and thus Spike were of his getting, that even knowing of the curse, he'd desired her to the point that would have destroyed them both. To protect her, he'd maintained, silencing the inner voice which whispered in the hot still hours of daylight that it was also to protect himself.

Buffy was staring down at his clenched hands, at the thin half-moons of crimson along the heel of his palm, where the nails had cut into the flesh. She took a stiff, unwilling step towards him, then another, and another. He felt her palm come to rest on his shoulder, weightless as sunlight, and as painful. Her fingers slid down the length of his arm to curl around his hand. Tenderness there, but no passion. If he took her in his arms, kissed her...it would be nothing more than stirring up ashes just to see if he could. He'd left her behind, but had anything really changed?

"Spike can't change me," said Buffy. "I can't change him. We change ourselves. Because we want to. Because we have to. You didn't bring me back--"

"I could have."

Buffy's lips parted over a stillborn exclamation. "I could have," Angel repeated, his voice diminishing to a ragged shadow of itself. "The Powers That Be owe me a life. I fought for Darla's life, and I won... and it was all for nothing, because she'd already come back by magic once. But I'd still won a life, and when Willow came and told us that you'd died, the first thing I thought of was that I could bring you back." He was the one shaking now.

"It wouldn't have been right," she whispered, the delicate moth- touch of her fingertips fingers tracing the lines of his bowed shoulders. "I know that. I died a good death, doing what I had to do. I could never blame you for--"

"It wasn't because it was right." Every muscle was rigid as iron with the effort of getting the next word out, and the next, as the white-hot supernova of anger collapsed to a black hole of self-loathing. "God, I told you once I was weak--I watched them lower you into the ground, and it was like I was going with you." He remembered black lacework leaves edging a blood-washed sky; they'd held the funeral as late in the evening as the mortuary allowed. Spike held onto Dawn like a talisman. The younger vampire's sobs were barely audible over the dull thud of clods hitting wood, even to his ears, and that made them all the more intolerable. _You never loved her as I did, you aren't capable of it..._ "I grieved for you all summer. And then little by little...it got better. I began to get over you."

"But that's--" Her hand came to rest, lightly, on his face, lifting his head. "I never wanted anyone to spend their lives mourning me, Angel."

"You don't understand." Each syllable drew blood. "It was _easier_ with you dead. I didn't have to think about you being there, two hours away and untouchable as the moon. You were gone forever, and it was such..." His voice cracked. "Such a _relief._ I should have told Willow, or Dawn, at least, that I had a life to spend. I didn't. I didn't tell anyone. And then last month you called, and the first thing I thought was 'Oh, God, it's beginning again.'"

Buffy sat down on the bed, pale and stunned, and then, to his astonishment, she laughed--a broken-backed laugh that was half tears, but a laugh still. "Let me guess: you feel guilty. Don't. It's--well, it's not all right, but I get it. I really do. It's pretty much exactly how I felt when you came back from hell." She shivered, and this time he didn't think it was from the cold. "It could have. Started again, I mean. I was so lost...I could have chosen the pain to hold on to. Grab a handful of razor blades and you'll know you're real." She frowned. "That metaphor's lost something with the advent of Gillette Daisy."

He couldn't accept that easy absolution. "You were so distant when we met. You left without asking for anything, and I was grateful. I didn't want to think about what you might be going through. I could have prevented all of this. If you'd been brought back by the Powers instead of whatever dark magics the Raising spell calls on--don't you see, Buffy? I have to save you now. Because I didn't save you then."

She sighed, cradling her remaining shoe in her lap. "You can't save me, Angel. If I need saving, it's only me who can do it. I shouldn't have come back at all, but since I'm here...maybe I needed to put myself back together differently, and take a good look at all the pieces." She looked at him. "Do you know how long it's been since I felt good about myself? _ All_ of myself? If I'm a different Buffy, vive la difference."

And who was she now, this new improved reconstructed Buffy? "If it disappeared tomorrow...the curse...would you..."

"Would you?"

There wasn't any good answer to that question, he realized, because it wasn't the curse holding them apart any longer, on either side. Buffy stroked his cheek. "I have to go now. I have to find..." Her head jerked up and her eyes went wide, and she turned towards the door as if pulled by a magnet. "Spike?"

The door exploded inwards with a crash, and sunlight flooded into the room.

*****

When your day kicked off with a frantic five A.M. phone call from a vampire beginning, "Angel's kidnaped Buffy. Get your arse over here and give me a hand with a spot of torture," you were pretty much assured of a downhill slide from there. Xander leaned against the crypt wall, calculating exactly how many hours he could shave off his rapidly diminishing stock of leave time without cutting into his honeymoon. No contest between Niagara Falls and rescuing Buffy, but man, Anya was going to be pissed. "So why am I here again?"

"Because I got tired of recycling my quarters waiting for Giles to answer his bleeding phone." Spike was prowling back and forth across the crypt in game face, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, blue smoke trailing from the cigarette dangling from his lips. He came to a halt in front of the two men chained to the wall--the very same wall, probably the very same manacles, he'd used on Buffy last year and no, we are not detouring down that perverted little by-way. "You know, Harris here is non-combustible, so no point in stalling for sunrise, mates."

"You'll get sod all out of us, y' goat-buggering corpse," Weatherby croaked. He stood swaying in his bonds, all snarly and defiant despite darkening bruises and the runnels of clotted blood oozing from his broken nose. There were a couple of teeth on the floor of the crypt as well, but Xander honestly wasn't sure who they belonged to. Collins, unable to put weight on his broken ankle, sagged in his restraints. He kept making pitiful little kicked-hound whimpering noises, which Spike didn't seem to notice. The wailing of victims was probably the vampire equivalent of Muzak.

Xander'd never considered himself Mr. Sensitive; he couldn't remember the last time he'd been sick at the sight of blood. He'd watched steam rising from the savaged throats of fresh vampire kills on long cold January nights, kicked aside moldering skulls like stray beer cans searching through ancient tombs, and seen a Who's Who of demons dismembered in glorious Technicolor. He was down with the carnage, Vin Diesel cool. Dead bodies didn't bother him any longer.

Still-living bodies, those could still give him a twitch.

Spike drew the end of his cigarette to a cherry red, blew smoke in Weatherby's face, and then backhanded the Watcher viciously, holding back none of his strength. Weatherby's scream ended in a choked gurgle. "I don't ask a lot of life," Spike said. "Come home, have a bite and a nice snog, and sleep the sleep of the unjust. 'S reasonable, innit?" Another blow. "And if I can't have that..." He leaned closer. "Then I want to know where Angel's laired up." He removed the cigarette and contemplated it for a second. "And I've just had a happy thought: to get what I want, all I've got to leave intact is your tongue."

The glowing coal-end of the cigarette hovered an inch away from Weatherby's eye. Xander's stomach turned over. "Spike--"

"Don't be such a big girl's blouse, Harris." But the cigarette pulled back immediately, and Xander came to the not entirely comfortable realization that _that_ was why Spike had insisted he be here. _Xander Harris, Rent-A-Conscience, serving Sunnydale since 1997._ Weatherby spat in Spike's face the moment his binocular vision was out of immediate danger, and the vampire snarled and punched him again. Bones made nasty soft crunching sounds. Weatherby keened through his splintered nose and went limp in his bonds, and Spike stepped back with an exclamation of disgust. "Sod it, he's passed out again."

Xander snorted. "Could that be because you just gave him, oh, his third concussion of the night? This isn't working."

Human again, Spike wiped his face off on Collins's shirttail and favored Xander with a sullen cobalt glare. "You think you can do a better job, be my guest."

"Nuh uh. New York abstains, courteously." Xander averted his eyes from the captives and retreated to the far end of the little series of caves, pulling Spike with him. "The hitting? Perhaps satisfying, but not working fast enough. If Willow were here she could do a truth spell." God, he wished Willow were here. Threatening violence was fine; heck, Buffy did it all the time. Throwing a few punches to back up the threats, also peachy. But at that point, the bad guys were supposed to break and spill their guts, eliminating the necessity of resorting to the messy stuff. Criminals were a superstitious and cowardly lot; it was in the contract.

"Yeh, well, she's not here, and Tara's not witch enough to bust through the Council's Jedi mind tricks--fuck, it took Angelus hours to soften Rupert up to the point Dru could get to him." Spike ceased his nervous pacing long enough to drive a fist into the wall in frustration. A shower of earth pattered to the floor. "And for the first time in my unlife, I regret to say I'm no Angelus."

Xander grimaced. "Well, I'm sure as hell no Dru."

Spike raked a hand through his hair, leaving streaks of gore in its wake--the gel had given up the ghost some hours ago and he was starting to look like a refugee from the undead version of _Soul Train._ "You're right," he said, nowise pleased about it. "We haven't time to wear 'em down properly. We need something that'd make 'em piss themselves even if we hadn't got 'em chained to a wall."

"Maybe we should try Giles again--see if he knows their deep dark secrets from their days at Eton," Xander suggested.

Spike snorted. "If that lot's public school, I'm a vegetarian. 'Sides, there's only one deep dark secret an Englishman's got from Eton, and I'm not in the mood to drop trou and exploit it. What's a Watcher afraid of, anyway? Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties are all in a day's work."

"That's the trouble with fates worse than death, because most of them?" Xander yawned and rubbed the back of his head. "Aren't. Except..." He snapped his fingers. "Fate worse than death!" he repeated. "I'm looking at one!"

Spike vamped out, bared his fangs and crooked his fingers in an exaggerated pantomime. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yes, Brain, but where are we going to get the complete score of the _HMS Pinafore_ at this hour?"

That garnered him a blank look. Then, "Someone'll be singing soon enough," Spike replied cheerily, and bounded back into the main cavern. He ripped the remains of Weatherby's shirt away, leaving his neck and shoulders bare, then ran back to the washstand in the bedroom and returned with the pitcher. Spike dashed water across Weatherby's face and stood back.

The Watcher came to, coughing up blood and snot, and slurred, "Think you're smart...L.A. team'll come down here when we don'..."

"Shut yer gob, idiot!" Collins yelled, springing to sudden livid life. He licked his swollen lips and eyed Xander with loathing. "Working with one of them, are you? We made that mistake and look where it's got us. Think you can get away with this? You'll have the full wrath of the Council on your neck by midnight, both of you."

Spike grabbed Weatherby's chains and pulled him close. "Oooh, lovely, a lifetime supply of tweed-wrapped takeout! Tempting, but--" He sniffed Weatherby's naked shoulder with the air of a connoisseur, and the man shuddered and moaned, trying to twist away as far as his bonds allowed. "You'll be calling old Travers up in person and telling him you're safe as houses."

"Spike, no!" Xander clutched the vampire's shoulder and felt Spike's fractional wince as he put pressure on the wound. He pulled Spike away from Weatherby. "You can't do..._that!"_

"What, make 'em my undead minions, subject to my every whim cos I'm their sire and master and all? Watch me." Spike shrugged Xander off with minimal winciness, and faster than blinking his fangs were sunk into Weatherby's flesh at the angle where neck met shoulder. Crimson beads welled up around the roots of his canines. Weatherby stiffened and screamed, thin and high and terrible, jerking violently in Spike's grasp.

Bent over the Watcher's crumpled body, Spike's demonic countenance was in shadow, lantern-yellow eyes glowing beneath a halo of wild, blood- matted curls. A hair-raising snarl rolled through the confines of the crypt, and Xander's hands took off on a not-entirely-voluntary quest for the nearest sharp piece of wood. He gripped the ever-present stake in his coat pocket. _Act. It's an act. Is it an act?_ "Spike, think about what you're doing--"

"I'm thinking of nothing but." Spike pulled back, long pale fingers splayed across Weatherby's cheek as he held the man's head in place, and whispered in his ear, intimate as a lover. "You can tell me what I want to know now, or you can tell me later. Every secret the Council's entrusted you with, you'll spill, and glad to do it. And then I'll let you go. Back home to meet your mates, and won't that be a party? Me, I went for the mass slaughter, but you strike me as the type to pick 'em off one at a time, slow and careful. You got a wife, mate? Kiddies? You won't have 'em long." He laughed and ran his tongue along the wire-taut cords of Weatherby's neck. "Or maybe you will. Never saw the use of siring brats myself, but I hear some fancy it."

Weatherby's harsh panting breath faltered into a mindless whine and Collins's white-hot loathing could have incinerated both of them on the spot. "By the time we'd rise your Slayer whore will be long gone and our own people will know--urk!"

"If you want the comfort of being able to scream," Spike's hand was at his neck in an instant, fingers digging into the larynx, "You'll not speak of my lady like that. And as for time--there's ways to speed these things up." He grinned. "Sounds like the most fun I've had in years."

"I can't let you do this, Spike!" Xander yelled, hoping to hell that all this was still part of the act. He lunged forward, stake held high, and while he was still suspended in Matrix slo-mo, Spike turned, smiled indulgently, dropped Collins, grabbed Xander's wrist and twisted, hard. Pain lanced up his arm and the stake went flying. _Wrist not broken, ergo, all part of act._ Xander tumbled to the floor, trying to look injured--and to find the stake again, just in case.

The hope which had surfaced briefly in Collins's eyes foundered and sank into a mire of despair. "Damn you," he sobbed.

Spike melted back into human form and patted Collins's cheek with a smile that would have done Lucifer proud. "Already taken care of, mate. Now where's Angel, which flight were you supposed to take out, and what's this about an L.A. team?"

Ten minutes later they were pounding across the street behind Restfield cemetery to Spike's car, Spike's blanket flapping madly as they dodged tombstones in the slanting white light of early morning. Xander fumbled with the keys to the padlock on the gate of the impound lot while Spike vaulted the fence, barbed wire and all, and landed with a curse on the other side, clutching one hand to his ribs. The vampire staggered to his feet and tumbled into the driver's seat of the DeSoto in a cloud of acrid smoke, gunned the engine and threw it into reverse. Xander hauled the gate open in a screech of protesting chain-link and flung himself into the passenger seat. They tore out of the lot in a screech of burning rubber, leaving the gate askew behind them. He sank back against the ancient black leather upholstery and gave up a small prayer to the gods of the California highways. "Shit. What if Angel was lying to them about the motel he was in?"

"Then we'll stake out the airport. I get close enough, I'll feel her." Spike squinted into what little sunlight made it through the blacked-out windshield and hunched over the steering wheel, lips moving silently--what did vampires pray to? The dark cotton of his T-shirt looked wet and shiny where it stretched over his ribs; the fence-jumping must have torn the healing wound open again. "Get my goggles out of the glove compartment, Harris, I'm half-blind here."

"And does this actually make any difference in your driving skills?" A rummage through the wilds of the glove compartment turned up the welder's goggles and Xander handed them over. He immediately regretted it as Spike resorted to steering with his knees while he got them adjusted. "Think Angel's evil again? Maybe the First got to him too?"

"Hang about, hadn't thought of that." Spike considered this worrisome possibility for a moment. "Nah, Angelus would've had more fun beating me up. Most like he's just being more of a prat than usual." He laid into the horn and swerved across the yellow line to pass an arthritic VW Beetle. "Out of the way, you sodding tortoise!"

Xander watched indistinct shapes whiz by outside the darkened windows. "'There's ways to speed these things up?' What, Redi-Gro for vamps?"

"Well, why not?" Spike asked, offended. "Master vampire here. I could have powers!"

"Ex-master vampire."

"Oh, right, rub it in."

"So if he hadn't...would you have tried really... you know... sucking on that guy?"

Spike rolled his eyes. "I was biting his trapezius muscle, you git. You want to drain someone properly, you've got to get your fangs into the jugular. And no. Promised Buffy I'd never drink from anyone who wasn't willing."

"So--you'll suck, but you won't swallow?"

Spike spun the steering wheel through a one-handed 180 and the DeSoto slewed across traffic and bounced into the potholed parking lot of the motel. Gravel sprayed as he hit the brakes. Xander caught a glimpse of Angel's convertible through the tiny clear portion of the windshield, parked in a straggling row of vehicles near the manager's office. Spike flung his blanket over his shoulders, smirked across at Xander and made a smoochy face. "Wouldn't you like to know."

*****

Buffy hauled Angel across the bed and out of the rays of incoming sunlight as two smoke-wreathed figures hurtled through the door. The tiny room filled with the ever-so-attractive fragrance of burnt vampire, and a second later, the smoke alarm affixed to the wall over the TV set went off with a shrill _ WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!_ With the infinite resource and sagacity characteristic of Slayers, not to mention the lightning reflexes, Buffy snatched up the half-full can of Diet Coke and flung its contents at Spike, extinguishing the crown of tiny blue flames which had started to lick at the tips of his hair. The smoke thinned slightly, but the alarm continued to wail until Xander, with the presence of mind demanded of anyone with highly combustible acquaintances, yanked it off the wall and pulled the battery out.

Spike, singed, blood-streaked, and dripping with NutraSweet, flowed across the room like a hunting cougar and bared his fangs at Angel--not the challenge of an interloper, but a reminder that they were on his territory this time. Angel's jaw clenched and his own eyes flickered gold. Buffy stepped between them and gave herself up to a dizzy grin of pride and relief--of course he'd escaped the Watchers. "Spike!"

At the sound of her voice Spike was human again in an instant. Blue eyes raked her up and down for signs of injury or coercion, and then he broke into a radiant grin of his own, enveloping her in a sooty embrace and pulling her half off her feet (and not incidentally, out of Angel's reach). "Just coming to save you, pet."

"Don't--mmm--need saving." Such a relief, the way suppressed anger and frustration drained away at his touch, as though his cool solid body were some kind of emotional heatsink. _Urge to kill falling..._ The long muscles of his back twitched beneath her fingers, and Buffy became aware that his shoulder was cold and damp against her cheek. "Besides, I was just coming to save _you._" She raised one hand to examine the damp spot; her fingertips came away smeared with red, and she shook them accusingly under his nose. "How badly are you hurt? Are the people who did this still on the loose?" Worried, she ran a hand down his abdomen. "Here too?" _Urge to kill rising..._

"Won't say I didn't _think_ about eating 'em, just a little bit, but they're chained up back at the crypt." Xander nodded confirmation, and Buffy quashed an infantile desire to say _so there!_ to Angel. She went virtuously back to assessing the seriousness of Spike's wounds instead. Spike glanced down at himself, dismissing the damage with a shrug. "'S nothing, love. Don't need saving either." He winced a little at her exploratory touch. "Though I might let Niblet get out the instruments of torture and check for splinters later."

Buffy tugged the lapels of his coat, which still smelled of reservoir water and duckweed, and whispered, "Sure I can't make it better?"

Spike buried his face in the curve of her shoulder and inhaled, dropping into that deep dark-chocolate shag-me-now rumble that set her bones humming. "Oh, yeh. Buffy makes everything better." He bent and licked the streak of blood from her cheek with a tender little growl.

Xander pulled a small, peeling roll of lozenges from a back pocket and offered it to Angel. "Tums? I keep them for just such occasions."

Reminded of his grandsire's presence, Spike's growl got deeper and considerably less affectionate. Angel's only response was a small bored sigh, which did nothing to improve Spike's temper. Buffy cautioned, "_William..._" and the growl subsided to a grumble. "It's all right. There's been a misunderstanding, and it's over." She sent a meaningful look in Angel's direction. "Isn't it?"

Angel's dark eyes bored into hers, intense and unwavering. After a long moment, he shook his head. "No, it's not. I want to help you, Buffy--"

"Giles needs it more," Xander broke in, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. "Helping, that is. Spike and I were just having a heart-to-heart with some of the G-man's esteemed former colleagues, and they happened to mention that they're not the only Watchers watching. Seems that while Angel was busy double-crossing Travers, Travers was busy double-crossing him."

Yay, Buffy thought, real trouble to distract from the latest episode of _The Young and The Lifeless!_ Angel frowned. "I expected he'd try something after--what's he done?"

Xander shrugged. "Basically? This whole thing with capturing Buffy is a big fat red herring. Travers agreed to your kidnaping scheme because he knew it had a good chance of getting you out of L.A. There's a second team there now--they went after Faith the moment Travers was certain Deadboy Senior here was out of town. According to Collins they were supposed to play along with Angel and keep him occupied for a couple of days. If they managed to capture Buffy or capture or stake Spike, bonus. If they didn't, no big. Getting to Faith was the important thing." He looked a little ill. "Collins wasn't sure, but he thinks they're going to try to kill her and call a new Slayer."

Angel's face remained expressionless, but his eyes went from startled to _Crush, Kill, Destroy_. If anything could divert Angel's attention from her, it was Faith, and no, not bitter at all, why do you ask? _Strategy Girl strikes again._ "You should go," Buffy said firmly. "Faith's a sitting duck in prison."

"Damn it," Angel snarled. "I should have known. They had a third partner when they went after Faith last time."

Spike looked grim. "That would be a bloke name of Smith. Remember I asked what you planned to do about Rupert? Smith's here in Sunnydale, taking care of the Council's other loose end. I tried to get hold of Rupes for half an hour this morning before falling back on Harris, and no joy. I thought he'd just turned his ringer off, but--"

"Right. Giles may be reclaiming his place in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Times Conked On The Head as we speak." Buffy glanced down at her bare feet, out at the inimical expanse of parking lot, grimaced, and started out the door. Spike touched her shoulder, and when she looked up, produced from his duster pocket her left boot, somewhat the worse for wear. "Glass slipper it's not, pet, but--"

She wasn't going to get all misty over a damp boot. Much. "You are nonetheless my hero. These are, like, my third-favorite pair of boots. Which might be more impressive if I owned more than three pair right now, but still. Come on, I can put them on in the car. Shotgun!"

Angel stripped the blanket off the bed and all four of them made a mad dash for the DeSoto. If there was anything in the world that smelled worse in the confines of a closed car than one slightly scorched vampire, it was two slightly scorched vampires. "Giles first," Buffy said, slamming the door behind her and shifting over to the middle of the front seat. If there was one thing that last twelve hours had done, it was banish any residual guilt over Spike-cosying in Angel's presence. "If he's OK, then Angel can head back to L.A. right away." She laid a possessive hand on Spike's thigh and felt the muscles bunch as he punched the car into gear and shoved the gas pedal halfway to China. Eight cylinders of environmentally unsound horsepower roared to life and the DeSoto peeled out of the lot in a cloud of exhaust.

"Minor problem. I take the radical step of driving a car that's not a moving violation in and of itself." Angel rapped on one darkened window with a knuckle. "I won't be able to leave till sunset."

"Git," Spike muttered. "If there's anything stupider than a vampire in a convertible...."

Angel raised an eyebrow. "It's a vampire on a motorcycle?"

"If you want to be a vampire on foot, keep talking."

"Shut up, both of you." Buffy glared from front seat to back. "Angel can borrow this car."

Spike sat bolt upright, taking maximum advantage of the few inches' difference in their seated heights. "He bloody well cannot!" Buffy's eyes narrowed. "Oh, bugger, all right, for Christmas and bloody puppies." He rounded on Angel, with terrifying disregard for oncoming traffic. "But you bring it back with a full tank, super high octane, mind, not that horse piss that makes the engine bang like happy hour at a whorehouse. And get it washed while you're at it. I don't want to get it back with bugs all over the grill."

Angel smiled tightly. "How about I just strap your skinny carcass to the grill as a hood ornament and let the smoke from your smoldering remains keep the bugs away?"

Xander sat back, laced his hands behind his head, and looked from one snarling vampire to the other. He raised pious eyes to the ceiling of the car and intoned, "Thank you, Santa, but when I said I wanted Spike and Angel locked in a closet together, there was this tacit agreement that I'd be elsewhere when it happened."

Buffy was positive that the Hellmouth situation was affecting time as well as the good/evil thing, because surely it had never taken so long to drive across town before, especially with Spike at the wheel. She managed to avert major bloodshed by insisting upon a detailed recounting of exactly what Collins and Weatherby had said from Spike and Xander, and a full report on Travers's plans from Angel by way of comparison. The DeSoto lurched to a stop in front of Giles's place shortly before nine by Xander's watch, and Spike was out of the car and dashing for the shelter of Giles's porch almost before Buffy was. Angel followed hard on his heels, apparently unwilling to let Spike outdo him in anything, even sun-related idiocy. The vampires crowded into the thin line of shade along the front window while Buffy, with Xander at her back, hammered on the rust-colored Mission-style front door. "There's three people inside," Angel said, his ear pressed to the glass.

"That's one too many." Buffy stepped back, fully prepared to kick the door in, when it swung open to reveal Giles. He was sans glasses and looked slightly harried, but most definitely conscious. "Giles!" she cried, pouncing him and giving him a rib-cracking hug. "You're not dead!"

"Buffy!" he exclaimed. "Likewise. I was beginning to worry--I've been trying to contact you all morning, and Tara said you hadn't returned home last night--"

"Long story," Buffy squeezed past him into the foyer, and the other three trailed in after her in a mutual stew of manly bristling and suspicious looks. "There were rogue Watchers, there was bloodshed, there was narrowly-averted lossage of really cute shoes. All this in addition to patrol, Willow-hunting, and a lesson in the correct methods of skinning giant armor-plated slugs. Is everything all right?" She lowered her voice. "We know there's a third person in here, and we couldn't get through on the phone--"

"Lines cut, I'm afraid. I've been using the pay phone in the rental office." Giles looked irritated for a moment. "Why in this day and age they wouldn't have assumed I had a cell phone and foregone the property damage--"

"Possibly because you still think the electric light bulb is a new-fangled luxury item?" Buffy peered past him into the living room, still a disaster area of half-packed boxes and precarious towers of books. "The Council sent the goon squad a little earlier than anticipated. Spike caught two of them, but according to them, there's a third one loose here. He's supposed to take you back to England for the Winston Smith treatment or something. But the main action is another team of three in L.A. trying to make Faith no longer a bottleneck in the calling of shiny new Slayers."

"Ah yes, Mr. Smith. We've met." Giles stepped aside and waved an arm at the couch. Slumped in the middle of a heap of disarranged cushions was an nondescript man, lean and slightly balding, dressed in dark Nikes, trousers, long-sleeved shirt, and stocking cap--either a Council wetworks specialist, or an elderly Goth with chilly ears. He was rocking slowly back and forth, staring up at the ceiling and blowing spit bubbles.

"Whoa," said Xander. "Danger, Will Robinson!"

"Ew." Buffy looked back at Giles. Given Giles's history, she wasn't really sure she wanted to know, but... "What did you do? Were there evil tattoos involved?"

Giles gave her a thin smile and retrieved his morning teacup. "I? Nothing. My houseguest, on the other hand..."

Daniel Tanner was sitting at the dining table in front of an untouched bowl of progressively soggier Weetabix. His head was buried in his hands, and when he looked up, his eyes were heartsick, far worse off than the unhappy Mr. Smith. "I didn't mean to," he whispered. "He--he attacked me, I just reacted--"

"Yes, and admirably quickly, too." Giles took a sip of tea. "The ingenious Mr. Smith effected an entry to the house through my bedroom window. Unfortunately for him, I had remained up late researching, and told Mr. Tanner he might as well use my bed. Mr. Smith mistook Mr. Tanner for me, and Mr. Tanner defended himself in his own inimitable--thank God--manner." He gazed thoughtfully at the man on the couch. "I'm informed that this is the version of the spell which wears off in time, so in a few hours we can question him. We've been granted a stroke of luck here; we've captured the entire team before any of them had a chance to report back to Travers."

Buffy sagged against the stairwell. Finding Giles alive and well released an inner tension she hadn't realized was holding her up, and four hours of drugged sleep in a lumpy, Spike-deficient bed wasn't cutting it. "OK. Angel, take the DeSoto and get on the road to L.A. right now. They won't be expecting you. Check in on Faith and--" She stopped and drew a breath. "Sorry. Your town, your rules. Whatever you think'll work. Just let us know what the sitch is there as soon as possible."

Spike took the keys from his duster pocket as if he was giving up his liver and held them out to Angel. "If I find one scratch on that car when you bring it back--"

"Not in the mood, Spike," Angel growled. His eyes lingered on Buffy's face, as open as she'd ever seen them, full of hope and anguish and resignation.

She had to say something. "I'll walk you to the car."

It was more of a sprint than a walk; Angel ducked into the shadows of the DeSoto's interior and stared at the dash for a moment to familiarize himself with the equipment. "I'll bring it back tonight if I can," he said, poking at various knobs and dials and wrinkling his nose at the overflowing ashtray. He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet, peeled off a few twenties and the keys to his car and handed them over. "Could you pay the motel for my room and make sure my car doesn't get towed?"

"Sure. No problem." She knew lots of words. Sometimes she could even arrange them into sentences. Some of them had to be the right thing to say at a time like this. "We can drive the car over to my place if you want; Spike's probably going to be there tonight, so--"

"Buffy..."

She gripped the edge of the car door. "Angel, I can trust you from now on, right? Not to pull this bullshit on me? Sunnydale's still _my_ town. You can tell me I'm making the biggest mistake of my life, you can join Xander's We Hate Spike Club and be treasurer--whatever. But if you put Spike in danger again--"

Angel's hands tightened on the wheel. "Yeah? My last sight of Spike leaving the crypt was him standing over the unconscious body of one Watcher, about to tear the throat out of the other. Some danger."

"And you _left_?" Buffy asked--voice perfectly flat, because she was Calm, Reasonable, Mature Buffy, who didn't get into screaming matches with her vampire ex any longer. Calm, Reasonable, Mature Buffy was leaving finger-sized dents in the metal of the car door. She wanted him to understand, even if he couldn't approve. She wanted world peace and a pony while she was at it. "Listen, Angel. Get this. Spike is very important to me. If you'd let Spike die, I would happily send you back to hell. My job--my real job--is even more important to me. If you'd let Spike kill a human, I'd make you look back on hell as a fond memory."

His lips took on a bitter twist. "If you're right about him, there was nothing to worry about."

"And if I'd been wrong you'd have let a man die to prove a point? God, Angel!" Buffy rubbed her forehead. "Saving me? For the thought, thanks. For the execution, not so much." He'd gone paler than usual, as if something she'd said had touched a hidden nerve. "We can't help it, can we? Hurting each other. It's just something that happens when we get close enough, like gravity."

He flinched. _ Just like that._ "What I said earlier..."

"Don't say you didn't mean it."

Angel sighed. "Which part? No, I meant all of it. I do want to help you, but I can see that forcing it won't work. Just...remember I'm here if you need me. I've been darker places than you can imagine, and I know what it takes to walk out of them. It's a hell of a lot harder to go uphill than down."

"That's...I'll remember." She could get mad again, or try logic. But somehow it didn't feel as if either option would make the situation any better. Maybe she'd just go home and make hot nasty vampire love with Spike instead. With handcuffs, and candles, and illicit borrowing of the strap-on Tara thought no one knew she had stashed under the laundry hamper, and...and letting him smoke in the house! _Yeah! I'm bad, baby!_ "If I do need help, I'll call. Promise." On impulse she leaned down and kissed his cheek. "Don't save me, Angel. Save yourself."

He didn't respond. Buffy stepped back onto the curb and watched him, a lone blanket-draped figure hiding from the bright sunshine, and then the blackened window rolled up, erasing him from sight. Buffy walked back to the porch, where Spike was lounging against the doorframe, watching. Buffy took his arm and they went inside. A minute later the DeSoto's engine turned over, and the hulking black sedan pulled away from the curb.

Xander shook his head. "Now that guy," he said, "Knows how to make an exit."

"Pity he doesn't make them sooner," Spike muttered, watching out the window as his baby's taillights disappeared into the distance.

Buffy punched him lightly in the arm. "Let's get you home and patched up before you bleed all over something valuable. We need to figure out what to do with the Watcher's Local 201, but I'd like to be less brain-dead when I do it." She looked up at Spike, studying his face. "You do know you don't need to be jealous, don't you?"

Spike rubbed his biceps, a glint of laughter in his eyes. "I figured that one out when he tried stealing you." He slipped his good arm around her shoulders and whispered, "You feel the need to take out some frustration by pounding on something vampire-shaped, love, I'm fit enough for a sparring match."

Had love always been curled inside her, waiting through the chill of heart's winter for the proper spring in which to unfold and blossom, or had she, as Angel feared, built it piecemeal out of wire and tissue paper, desperate to feel _something_? She couldn't have imagined this weird, wonderful, terrifying feeling into existence. She didn't have that much imagination. "No," she whispered back, "Buffy and edged weapons, bad combo right now." She bumped her hip against his with a demure smile, reaching down and digging her fingers into the firm muscle of his ass. "But having something vampire-shaped pound on me? Very cathartic."


	34. Chapter 34

The Hellmouth swirled in the center of town, a sullen Charybdis of mystical energies. Lesser scars and dimples in the fabric of reality orbited about it: there was the rift through which she and Anya had pulled her vampire doppelganger, over there the multiple ragged tears opened when Dawn's blood had seared the air last spring, there the fault line in which the Master had been trapped, and there the still-throbbing wound where the portal had escaped her control during Buffy's Raising. There were older rips and flaws in plenty, torn by not-so-subtle knives. Some were raw- edged and fraying, others knit up more or less well by time or their makers, ghosts of old summonings and failed rituals. The reality beneath reality was a fragile and much-mended thing--a quilt patched once too often, till the fabric itself was beginning to disintegrate.

_Willow?_

Far, far away, a tiny voice was calling to her, an ant-sized Tara squeaking hypersonic pleas. Inspiration struck, and she descended, swooping down towards earth once more. _Tara?_

_Willow? Oh, Willow--_

_I'm here, baby. Just keep talking. You can bring me home._ Willow soared on phantom winds, circling like a hunting hawk, drawing the focus of her search closer and closer to its goal.

Tara sounded bewildered. _Willow? Where are you?_

_Right here. Just keep...talking..._ Hah! There it was, the magical signature of the spellcloak, dark and gleaming as heart's blood. No wonder she hadn't been able to spot it earlier; the pearly glow of Tara's magic was distorted by Giles's puzzle-box subtlety and Spike's demonic ferocity. Two centuries of black cunning for Tara to draw on, there. It was unlike any spell cast by any of the three alone, and they'd managed to conceal it from her for what, forty-eight hours?

_**Pathetic, aren't they?**_ her constant companion murmured. _**Really, they're fortunate you're on their side.**_ A dark chuckle. _**More or less.**_

Willow ignored the comments from the peanut gallery as she picked the weave of the spell apart, analyzing it thread by thread. She had to admit Tara had done fantastically well on short notice and shorter resources. And was beginning to grow suspicious at her silence.

_Willow? What are you doing?_

_Just dropping by to say hi, baby. Love you._

_Willow!_

And she was back, plummeting back into her body with the shock of a plunge off the high dive. Willow sat up and massaged the beginnings of a cramp out of one calf, then lit the nearest bank of candles with the wave of a hand and a whispered "Ignite." Goblin-shadows danced across the irregular walls of the cavern as she slipped into her shoes. Now that she knew what they were up against, there were options. Breaking the spellcloak by force was possible, but would leave her drained and vulnerable; it drew on the energies of at least half a dozen people, forming a moebius of power as strong and as fragile as the braided loop of hair the spell was founded on. The crazies were human, and unaffected by the spellcloak. She could just send one of them to dig up the empty Mrs. Fields cookie tin buried under the edge of the front porch, and burn the loop of hair inside. There was more than one way to skin a Muppet.

And once that was done... Willow ran a comb through her hair, mulling over the possibilities. Opening another portal here, so soon, would be dangerous beyond belief, something that might make Sunnydale go poof, and possibly the entire world. But if she didn't, Sunnydale was most definitely going to go argh, urk, splat. She could go ahead with her plan, taking what steps she could to reinforce the walls of the world around her portal. Or she could try spiriting Buffy and Spike off to Encino and doing the big switch in someplace less prone to sudden aetheric collapse. Or she could chuck the whole thing and--no. Taking them on a road trip was probably safer, but that meant wasted time and more opportunities for them to escape or be rescued. Going ahead...

"Exalted Vessel?" The Harbinger appeared in her doorway, its gruesomely scarred head bowed. "There is a problem with one of the humans."

It lead her down the winding passage to another cave--smaller than the main cavern, but larger than her private quarters, guarded by another matched set of Harbingers. Crude beds were spaced along the rocky walls, along with a few filthy backpacks and duffle bags crammed with items scavenged from their campsite in the dump--clothes, food, plastic milk jugs of water, a motley assortment of medical supplies. Thirteen pairs of eyes focused on her entrance, bitter, bewildered, or dull with resignation.

The old man lay in a fetal curl on a pallet against the rear wall of the cavern where the crazies were housed. "He's not eating," the man in the yellow windbreaker said, getting up from his crouch to meet her. Jim, Willow reminded herself; it was important that she remember their names, because people, not faceless pawns. "We can take care of them as long as they eat on their own, but if they can't eat..." He raised his thin shoulders and let them fall in a helpless shrug.

Willow dropped to her haunches to inspect the patient. He was a dried-up, cicada-shell husk of a man, his slack toothless mouth and rheumy eyes framed by lank grey hair and grimy stubble. The kind of guy who'd lurch past you on the street, talking to thin air and stinking of stale urine. They called him Bench, because that was where Tanner had found him on the night Xander and Spike had gotten away from them; his real name was anyone's guess. "Hey," she said. "Can you hear me?"

For a second the faded eyes caught fire, full of pain and confusion and urgency, and knobbly fingers closed around her wrist. "Important," he whispered. Willow bent closer. "Blisters. You don't wear socks, you get blisters." He slumped back to the cavern floor, mumbling and twitching in his own world.

"What's wrong with him?" Willow asked, jerking her hand from his loose grasp. "Besides the brain-sucky thing, I mean."

Jim shrugged again. He was one of the ones from the alley, coherent now, but he used as few words as possible, as if he had a limited supply and feared to run short. "Dunno. DTs. Alzheimer's. Schizophrenia. Stroke."

One from Column A, two from Column B. Running into Tanner had probably been the best thing that had happened to Bench in months, maybe years; in exchange for the last useless scraps of sanity he'd gained a society of protectors and providers. That was a moderately sickening thought. Willow sighed, brushed hair from her eyes and got to her feet, looking around at the cavern and the dozen-plus men and women encamped there. Most of them, deprived of Tanner's restorative spell for days now, were deteriorating, but they took care of each other as best they could. She'd wanted to help, but were they really any better off now, crammed into an underground bunker?

They gave her the heebies and the big-time guilt. She couldn't help being reminded of Tara's brush with madness every time she passed their little slumber party. But she needed them, and the ones she'd bespelled in the alley were as sane as could be expected under the circumstances; that was something, wasn't it?

"So what do you do when that happens, the not-eating?" she asked Jim.

"They die," he said flatly. "After three-four days with no water."

"We could take him to the county hospital."

Jim shrugged again. "Could." He'd do as instructed. Even the nominally sane ones were passive, half-convinced this was just another degree of madness. They might be right about that.

Young Buffy wiggled up, sucking on a lollipop. **"No insurance, no family, no desperate measures. He'll be dead inside a week."**

Willow gritted her teeth and ignored it. The First was seriously starting to get on what was left of her nerves. She stalked off to the main cavern, where a work gang of Harbingers was busily lugging fallen rock away and reconstructing the altar which the cave-in had destroyed. In another day or two it would be finished and re-consecrated, and the Bringers could resume the unending chant which channeled the spirit manifestations of the First--which couldn't happen any too soon as far as Willow was concerned; being the only one capable of communicating with it was kind of like having a satellite dish that brought in two hundred channels worth of the Manson Family Network.

A second group of the robed priests was bustling around at the opposite end of the cavern, drawing mystic symbols on the sandy floor and laying out the components for her planned spells. The scene was weirdly like one of Xander's job sites, except with chicken bones.

Willow stopped to survey their progress, giving the stones and bones and smudge sticks of bundled herbs a cursory inspection. She'd performed the Ritual of Restoration twice now, and had no doubts she'd be able to do it a third time, blindfolded and standing on her head if necessary. The spell to cure the remaining crazies was likewise a lock; all she needed for that was Dawn. The rest wouldn't be quite so easy. She wouldn't be playing 'Where's William' through seven zillion dimensions; Spike's soul had been a direct exchange for Buffy's life, so in theory, putting Buffy into the portal should make his soul pop right out. The tricky part would be opening and closing the portal.

_**"You know how you can make it less tricky,"**_ Young Buffy said with a lascivious lick of her lolly. Her eyes went big and liquid and her lip trembled._** "Willow, I'm depending on you."**_

"No! We're just opening a portal and doing an even exchange. I have enough power to just _do_ it now. It doesn't require a life."

_**"Ritual has purpose, Willow,"**_ Jenny Calendar said, reasonable. _**"Ritual channels the magic, shapes it, controls it. It's not just about power; you know that. Magic has a price, and you can't always name one that suits you."**_ She began pacing the cavern floor, her feet leaving no trace on the sand. _**"The solstice is next Friday."**_ Her concern seemed absolutely genuine for a second. _**"If you fail to right the Balance before then, Sunnydale will go up in flames, but if you bungle the opening of this portal, it'll be destroyed just as surely."**_ She leaned close, her immaterial lips only inches from Willow's ear. _**"Blood opens the gates. Blood can seal them. What's the population of Sunnydale these days? Thirty thousand? Fifty thousand? Against one old man--one old man whose existence is nothing but pain and dementia anyway."**_

The sense memory of the last portal spiraling out of her control, of pouring her magic and her life into that bottomless sucking hole in an attempt to fill it, close it, control it, warred in her brain with the vision of Sunnydale as a slaughterhouse for vast shining shapes. Why was it that the powers for good in the universe never deigned to step down to Earth and give the occasional pep talk or commemorative T-shirt or something? No, the only time they'd make an appearance was for wrath-of-God type events, like those annoying people who'd only come to your party if they knew ahead of time you were serving really good hors d'oeuvres and never helped do dishes afterwards. It really ticked her off sometimes.

_Lower beings. That's us._ The Vorlons were just as dangerous as the Shadows in the end. Willow clenched her fists, concentrating on the bite of her nails into the soft flesh of her palms. "You can't measure lives like that."

Jenny smiled. _**"Not a bargain Buffy would make, hm? That's right, the sister who wasn't even real, didn't even exist before last year, was more important to her than you, or your parents, your friends, or the entire rest of the world. If you could ask that old man, do you think he'd rather waste away hooked to a battery of tubes in some hospital? Or go out as a hero, saving the lives of thousands with his death?"**_

Willow swallowed. She wasn't like Buffy, existing in her own righteous little Slayer cocoon. She'd been born in Sunnydale, grown up here. She had friends and teachers and family here, and she couldn't just write them off for principle. But she couldn't--

_**"You don't have to,"**_Jenny murmured. _**"You're my vessel. Remember how it was with the vampire, in the alley? I'm always with you. Always in you. Be with me. Be me. Relax, and let me make the hard decisions."**_

"And then it won't be my fault?" Willow replied bitterly.

Buffy was back, tossing her shiny cheerleader hair. "You know what's your problem, Wills? You're still looking for the right answer. There aren't any. All the answers are wrong. They all suck. Some just suck harder than others. Some prices--"Joyce Summers looked at her, pale and wan, with thin, radiation-ravaged hair. _**"Are higher than you're willing to pay."**_ Her understanding smile was like a knife. **_"It's all right, dear. We all get frightened, and Buffy will never know what you _could_ have done for me...or for the world."_**

"SHUT UP!" Willow screamed. Half the Harbingers shrank away; the other half stared as if she were the madwoman. She closed her eyes. It was nice inside her head. Dark. Quiet. "Jeeves," she said, "Go get Bench, and bring him out here."

*****

> _But well you can't refuse  
> And you just can't choose  
> What she's gonna do  
> I said you can't refuse  
> And you just can't choose  
> What she's gonna do_

Spike would have put the top down, but a steady rat-tat-tat of raindrops beat on the windshield. "This is not the way back to the house!" Buffy yelled over the raucous blare of the stereo. In deference to the change in the weather she was wearing an extremely distracting V-necked claret sweater which showcased the hints of actual cleavage she'd started to display in the last week or so. The bulk of the Torino's spacious front seat remained unused; her warm lithe body tucked neatly under his arm, warding off the December chill.

"World's round, Slayer, we'll get there," Spike yelled back, kicking the volume up another notch. Whatever its flaws as a conveyance for the UV-allergic, the Angelmobile had a bloody marvelous sound system. "The Grand Poof's running up my mileage, and turnabout's only fair play, innit?" The Torino soared over the crest of a rise and swooped into the next curve, tires spraying a ragged silver crescent of water across the shoulder. The road switchbacked higher and higher, up the sloping backside of Kingman's Bluff. Spike canted his head out the window and howled into the wind, "Top of the world, ma!"

Buffy groaned, butting her head against his shoulder. "I knew you were being way too reasonable about the car!" She tugged at his sleeve. "Come on, left turn at Albuquerque."

Spike let go the wheel with a tongue-wagging grin. "Ah, ah, ah, love, don't want me to lose control and dent Grandad's Penis Machine, do we? Loosen up a bit and enjoy the ride!"

Oops. Bit too far, there. The small warm hand on his elbow vanished, and reappeared with frightening swiftness on his crotch. "Turn around, Spike," Buffy cooed, giving him a squeeze. "Or I'll stop torturing you."

Her fingers kneaded playfully, like a kitten pretending it didn't realize it had claws. Spike nearly ripped the steering column free of the dashboard, instantly iron-hard in her grip. "Fuck that for a game of soldiers," he gasped, slewing to a stop in the parking lot for the scenic overlook at the top of the bluff. "Better yet, fuck me."

"I don't know," Buffy murmured, the tip of her tongue protruding in concentration as she maneuvered around the gear shift. Through the windshield behind her the tile roofs of Sunnydale fell away below, the dull red-brown of dried blood in the storm's half-light. A fairy-web of streetlights glimmered wetly against walls and buildings leached of color by the rain. On the horizon the leaden-grey Pacific stretched out to meet the bank of fresh storm clouds sweeping in from the west, dragging wedding-trains of vapor across the waves. "You've been a very naughty vampire."

Her right hand did wonderful, agonizing things while her left worked the tab of his zipper down with equally agonizing slowness. "If I have, it's your job to--ah!--punish me, innit?"

Buffy freed him from the confines of his jeans, cradling his balls, fondling him as his cock rose up, swaying towards her like a charmed cobra. Her fingernails traced shivery patterns up and down its length. She pinched the foreskin, hard, and his hips jerked spasmodically. "I've given this a lot of thought," she said, "And your punishment is to be the guinea pig in a terrible scientific experiment."

"Ah? Got a history of slipping my cage in those, love--oh, God, bite me, you magnificent bitch--aaaahhh!" Hands, lips, teeth, tongue, hot wet heavenly suction and he was coming so hard and fast he scarcely had time to breathe, not that he needed to breathe but fuck almighty he wanted to. Release went on forever, wave after glorious wave, until he went blissfully limp in her mouth.

Buffy drew back, panting, all flushed cheeks and tousled hair. Her little pink tongue made the rounds of her glossy lips, licking pearly spunk from the corners of her sweet wicked mouth. Stretched belly-down on the front seat, her hard little nipples were twin points of fire against his thigh, perilously close to poking right through her skin-tight fuck-me sweater. Her golden head descended again and she was devouring him, making little yummy purry noises deep in her throat. In minutes, hell, seconds, she had him achingly hard once more, thrusting deep into her willing mouth, no finesse, no control, no attempt to make it last, just_coming coming coming again again again!_

Buffy was getting off on getting him off, hips undulating in wanton rhythm with her tongue, practically humping the edge of the seat. Spike gathered enough of his scattered volition to slip a hand down under her belly. Hard cold fingers probed the warm crevice between her thighs, seeking out the damp spot on the seam of her jeans and working it till it was sopping. Buffy moaned and squirmed against his hand, coming with him as she sucked him off for the third time in fifteen minutes. Spike growled protest when her mouth left him, but it quickly muted to a lustful rumble as she sat up, fumbling with the buttons of her own jeans and trying to wriggle them down over her hips in the cramped confines of the car. All higher brain functions shut down; Little Spike smelled home and was chafing at the bit to get back to the stable.

The cooling metal of the engine pinged and ticked in the rain. They wrestled together for space and leverage, choking on giggles from the awkwardness of it. The gearshift was jabbing him in the thigh; thank God both of them were short. Buffy flopped over backwards, hair cascading over the door handle, her slim chest heaving with exertion as she won the battle with her painted-on jeans, baring her pretty quim--Paradise by the bloody dashboard lights indeed. Spike buried his nose in her curls, tongue lapping out for a quick teasing caress that made her whimper and twitch under him. "So wet you are, love," he rasped, "all dripping with milk and honey--fuck the Promised Land, I'll take your cunny, wrapped round me like a velvet glove. You're like warm cream, not too hot, not too cold--tonight my li'l Goldilocks is getting it just right."

He didn't need poetry to sing her body's praises, no, buried between her trembling thighs he could speak in tongues, or with them. Didn't take long to bring her to a thrashing frenzy beneath him, fingers wound tight in his hair, moss-agate eyes luminous with ecstasy. The back of her head thumped against the window glass. Delirious with the taste of her, Spike elbowed his way across the seat, licking and nibbling every tender crease of sweat-luscious skin. The clever juncture of hip and thigh, the gentle dip and swell of belly and breasts, the elegant curve of her collarbone--his lips traversed the intimate geography of her body meridian by meridian until at last he could sink himself into her welcoming depths. Buffy arched cat-lithe beneath him and hooked both calves over his shoulders, granting him deeper access. Her shiver of response as he began to move sent lighting jolts of pleasure radiating out from his cock.

Buffy cried out as they rocked together, a wordless paean of physical joy, nails digging into his shoulders, hips bucking up to meet him. She came like the storm breaking against the cliff-face, torrents and forked lightning, and began building to a second climax almost immediately. The car really was shaking as he pounded into her, and the gleeful realization that he was going to be sending Angel's car back reeking of Slayer musk and his own jizz brought Spike home with a triumphant roar. Buffy wasn't quite there yet; she snarled against his chest, biting his nipples through the fabric of his shirt and clenching around him till he was filling her to bursting once more.

Outside the car a lone ray of blood-red sunlight pierced the clouds. Sunset glazed the car windows just long enough to raise a warning tingle on his bare backside and winked out as Buffy keened her release. They lay there panting as the cold wind whistled around the car, Spike lodged soft and sated within her, luxuriating in her warmth. Buffy's hands wandered idly over his torso as they often did in the quiet moments after, as if she were memorizing him against future privation. He nuzzled her ear and heaved a long contented sigh. "Right, guess this makes up for falling asleep on the couch the minute we got home. What's my value to science, then?"

"Mmm. Trying to determine if men can achieve multiple orgasms. Was the experiment a success?"

Spike traced the convolutions of her ear with the tip of his tongue. "I think more clinical trials are in order."

Buffy placed a palm in the center of his chest and gave him a playful shove. With considerable reluctance Spike pulled himself free and sat up. She retrieved her purse from beneath the front seat, where it had gotten kicked at some point in the proceedings, and began making repairs in the rear-view mirror. Spike rolled down his window and lit himself a cigarette. He took a lazy puff and settled back to watch Buffy put herself back together, a far more intensive operation than his own tuck and zip. What she had to go through to pour herself back into those jeans was almost as arousing as the blow job. "That's_it_," she grumbled, "I can barely get these pants zipped, tomorrow I go on a--" She took a took a deep breath and did up the last button. "You and Tara are in this vile plot against my waistline together, aren't you? She keeps cooking things and you keep making me hungry."

"Ah, you've sussed out the evil plan," Spike said with a cheerful leer. It was lovely to watch day to day as her body slowly regained the curves he remembered from that long-ago night at the Bronze, like a river finding its way back to its proper bed. "She keeps you fat and I keep you happy and you won't stand a chance next time I take a fancy to destroy the world."

"Which you do so often, and with such stunning success."

"What, destroy the world? Over-rated."

She smiled, the secretive, tender little smile he treasured above all others, the one that was meant for him and no one else in the world. "No, make me happy."

A blaze of light washed over the bluff, rescuing him from going all soppy over that one, and Spike scooted down under the steering wheel, out of reach of the... "What the hell?" He levered himself up again and peered over the top of the dash. "I know it's been a long time since I had much personal acquaintance, but I don't remember sunlight going all blue as a usual thing."

Buffy was leaning forward, gripping the dash and staring down at the darkening town below. "Not as a usual thing, no."

Out of the darkness below a coruscating fountain of light erupted, illumining the sky with an arcane aurora borealis. Radiant spears of crimson and gold, violet and viridian, soared upwards, arcing across the cloudy sky and falling back to earth at various spots across town--the ruins of the old factory, the construction site where Glory's tower had been, an apparently random apartment complex. At each impact a burst of light flared up and then vanished, swallowed into nothingness.

"I'm going out on a limb and predicting this isn't good." Spike turned the keys in the ignition and hauled on the steering wheel; gravel crunched as the car wheeled round on its own length.

"Well, of course not," Buffy muttered, tugging her sweater back into place. "I had sex, naturally something evil's going to come along immediately afterwards."

Spike chucked his cigarette butt out the window as they slalomed back down the bluff. "Well, then, love, it 'n me'll be having words. I'm the only evil thing that gets to come when you have sex."

*****

"...and the skin had healed right over some of the splinters, so I totally had to cut him open with a razor blade. I mean, it wasn't deep, they were right under the skin, and he doesn't really bleed much because no circulation, but still, no shaky hands or anything." Dawn held out the hand in question to demonstrate non-shakiness.

"And all this without him screaming like a girly-vamp and waking me up? Golf claps all around." Buffy slurped up a strand of spaghetti. In light of the earlier life-or-death struggle with the forces of Gloria Vanderbilt, she'd firmly intended to restrict herself to a small salad, but Tara had made enough spaghetti to put the Olive Garden out of business. Willow baked in the aftermath of disaster; Tara, apparently, cooked in the forlorn attempt to keep disaster at bay. Which meant, she consoled herself, that eating two helpings with garlic bread and tossed salad was a virtuous action designed to make Tara feel better, not just post-slay, post-Spike indulgence.

"What can I say, Bit's got a way with a knife." Spike stole a piece of Buffy's garlic bread and dunked it into his blood. "Healed up right nice once they were out, too, and a good thing, considering the way you had me... exerting myself." Buffy kicked him under the table and Spike smirked at her over the vinegar cruet. "What? It's like bleeding Mardi Gras out there tonight. We must have dusted half a dozen of my nearest and dearest between Main and Wilkins alone."

Dawn executed Eye Roll #37, I Am Way More Mature Than You. "I've seen you guys on 'patrol', remember?" She surrounded 'patrol' with air quotes. "Stake, smooch, stake, smooch, pointless argument, smooch, and then one of you throws the other against a wall and next thing you know you're running up the premiums on some poor guy's earthquake insurance." She grinned with sisterly malice and Buffy seriously considered dunking her in the salad bowl. "Oh, and also, Anya called and said if you guys can get that demon slug skin over to the shop tomorrow, she's got a meeting with the buyer lined up."

Spike nodded and took a healthy swig of garlic-butter-flavored pig's blood. "Sorted. Good bet the tunnels will have cleared out by then after Red's latest showstopper."

"Remember the good old days when everyone just pretended the weird stuff wasn't happening?" Buffy stabbed an innocent meatball in a fit of Slayerly pique. "I swear, the whole town came out to stand on their lawns and gawk up at the pretty colors. Vampires included." She sopped up the last of her spaghetti sauce with a frown. "But if the Wonderful World of Disney teaser was Willow trying to break through Tara's spell, or find Dawn, her aim's off. She hit everywhere but here."

Tara nodded. In the wake of Willow's astral fly-by she looked red-eyed and sniffly, and hadn't eaten more than a bite or two, though she'd pushed her food through enough laps around her plate to qualify it for the Indy 500. "I don't think--it had to be something else. It felt... big. Way bigger than getting through one little cloaking spell."

"Angel checked in yet?"

Dawn nodded. "He called around eight and said he was just getting onto the 101." Hostility tinged her voice. "Elvira, Mistress of the Skank's with him."

Buffy frowned; playing nice with Faith again wasn't high on her Make A Wish list, but fifteen awkward minutes while Angel switched cars was hardly a slumber party complete with hair-braiding and giggly boy talk. She'd deal. Dawn misinterpreted her silence. "You're not still going to have Angel take me to Dad, are you?" she protested. "That's the first place Willow would look!"

"You're right." Dawn, about to burst forth with more argument, shut her mouth with a blink of surprise. Buffy glanced at Tara. "Even Supercharged Willow's got limits, right? Angel can take Dawn some not-Dad's place out of range of any locator spell Willow can cast. Bonus: None of us will know where she'll be, so if Willow gets hold of any of us even a truth spell won't help."

Tara nodded. "That could buy us some time."

"No!" Dawn leaped to her feet, sending her chair scooting across the dining room. "I have school, and I can't believe I'm using _school_ as an excuse! I'm sick of spending my life as the ball in a game of magical keepaway! Besides, you can't send me away. You need me."

Buffy grit her teeth and very carefully arranged her silverware on her empty plate. "I do, Dawn. But so does Willow, and--"

"You don't get it." Dawn squared her shoulders, her still-girlish features taking on an adult determination. "You need me _because_ Willow needs me. To lure her into the Hellmouth." She spread both arms wide and pirouetted. "Voila. Dawn 'They call me Schmuckbait' Summers."

For a second Buffy was certain someone had heaved a brick at her stomach, leaving her breathless as any new-risen fledgling. "No," she got out at last. Her voice sounded surprisingly normal.

"No, why?" Framed defiantly in front of the painted-tile mural over the sideboard, Dawn played up her superior height for all it was worth. "No because I'm too young? I'm the same age you were when you started fighting vampires. No because it's too dangerous? You said yourself Willow doesn't want to hurt us. Or is it just no because I'm your sister? Everyone else puts themselves on the line! God, Buffy, let me _do_ something for once!"

Some small cool rational part of her sat in the back of Buffy's skull, nodding at everything Dawn said, just as it had nodded last spring when Giles had pressed another argument concerning her sister. As then, another, atavistic portion of her brain rose up with a snarl and strangled it. "Just no! I promised Mom I'd keep you safe! In what universe does using you as the cheese in our better mousetrap qualify as keeping you safe?"

Tara ducked her head and fiddled with the crumpled napkin in her lap. "That reminds me, I need to feed Amy." She disappeared swiftly and completely enough that Buffy strongly suspected magic was involved, but she couldn't divert her attention from the Dawn stare-down to be certain.

Dawn threw up her hands with a strangled _rrrgh!_ of frustration. "There is no safe!" She aimed a lethally accurate hair-flip at her sister, snatched up a random armload of dishes and stomped off to the kitchen to clatter them around in the sink as loudly as possible. "Send me away, see if I care! Maybe I'll just stay in L.A. and let Dad ignore me in person. It'll be better than being pwecious baby Dawnie forever here!"

"Oh, you're about a million miles from precious!" Buffy yelled after the back of her sister's departing head. She stood glaring at the kitchen door for a second, then whirled and stomped off in the opposite direction. She grabbed her coat from the rack in the foyer, shrugged into it and stormed out onto the front porch, where her drive abandoned her. With a discouraged sigh she leaned against the railing and stared out into the darkened street. Christmas lights twinkled, reflecting in wet asphalt; the rain had slacked off and the world was wet and still and cold beneath a ragged ceiling of clouds. Her breath smoked on the air. It was the dark of the moon, nearing the longest night of the year, and she had a week to figure out how to lure Willow into the Hellmouth and keep her there long enough for... what? And no ideas. Zero, zilch, nada. Except for the unthinkable.

She felt Spike's presence before the front door opened. He sauntered out onto the porch and lazed against one of the supporting pillars, thumbs tucked into his jeans pockets. "The Bit... Dawn... she's a brave girl. Like her sis. She just wants to be part of it," he said softly. "Mix it up a bit. Gets so you've got to do something, sometimes."

Buffy tilted her head back and looked up; a patch of starless matte-black sky showed through a rent in the clouds. "I used to think Mom was so unreasonable about me and slaying. I just...I wanted... Dawn was going to have everything I couldn't. College, and parties, and boyfriend troubles that don't involve mass murder, and a real job. And now she's getting sucked into all this. Again. She _wants_ to get sucked in and I just don't understand how she can throw everything away like that!"

Spike was quiet for a moment. "Sometimes it's worth it, giving things up." He cocked his head in wordless invitation, shifting position to accommodate her in the circle of his arms, and Buffy allowed her body melt against his.

He felt so good to melt against. Lately the hollows beneath those breathtaking cheekbones weren't quite so deep, and the austere planes and angles of his body were muting into sleek muscular curves. She approved--he must have dropped a good twenty pounds living on whiskey and grief after her death, until her sister'd bullied him into laying off the Jack Daniels and feeding regularly again. Some of the photos of him and Dawn over the summer were positively scary. And there was another example of grown-up responsible Dawn she didn't want to think about right now, taking care of Spike as much as Spike had taken care of her... She burrowed into his chest, blotting out worry in his scent. "Mmm. Comfy."

The corners of his eyes crinkled with laughter. "Yeh, good thing the Slayer's blood special's only a few days a month or I'd be as tubby as Peaches."

"Dork. Play nice." Buffy stroked the firm bulge of his biceps. "I'll just have to make sure you get lots of exercise, won't I?"

They were both losing their sharp corners, the edges honed by desperation and loneliness. She didn't know if that was a bad thing--if she were still measuring out her life in low-fat yogurt cups and lonely, unsatisfied nights, would she have come up with a solution by now? No thinking. Kissing instead. This was good. Right here and now. The crisp post-storm air. The quilted warmth of her jacket. The satisfying aches of a good fight or three. The liquid interplay of tongues, the sinuous twining of warm flesh with cool. Spike's hard-muscled black denim thigh, thrust between her legs at just the right angle. Her hands slipping up beneath his shirt, kneading the broad plateau of his shoulders. Spike's eyes, half-lidded, near-indigo in the shadows, as she laminated her mouth to his...

Was it a demon thing, this willingness to submerge herself in the moment? Fight, fuck, and feed--they'd certainly been doing enough of all three. Was that her, really, a veneer of humanity as thin as Spike's, stretched over some inner core of dark hedonistic power? Or was it just that after six years living on the edge of the Hellmouth she'd finally learned that any fleeting pleasure was to be snatched and savored?

The familiar growl of the DeSoto pulling into the driveway merged with the familiar growl of its owner, and Buffy pulled back, blinking away spots as the headlights washed over the porch and died away with the engine.

*****

Faith woke face-down in jolting darkness, surrounded by a sickening miasma of stale tobacco, old leather and grease. Flung out an arm to steady herself, bit back a gasp as torn muscle and bruised bone shrieked in protest. Looked up, squinting through the dark blotches smeared across her vision...

No, wait. The dark blotches were smeared across the windows. She was lying in the back seat of some unfamiliar monster of a car, swaddled uncomfortably in county hospital blankets, as it sped along a potholed access road. On the floor an empty whiskey bottle nestled in a litter of fast-food wrappers and old blood bags, clinking against the door with each jounce and bump. Highway lights flashed past overhead, and the whoosh of nearby traffic vied with the roar of the engine. Where the fuck was she?

The last thing she remembered was the digital panic of the machines that went ping, and running feet from the nurses' station down the hall. Faith rubbed her chest; there was a deep throbbing ache radiating out from her breastbone, as if someone had none-too-gently rammed a six-inch needle between her ribs. It was a newer pain than the already-healing gash in her side. The attack had been a joke, the home-made blade barely creasing the muscle--just an excuse to get her transferred into the hospital, where the injection of supposed painkillers sent her into spasming darkness. She still felt like shit, stomach roiling with post-anesthesia nausea.

"...no. An hour ago."

Deep, slightly impatient--she knew that voice.

"...not sure. Two minutes, maybe. Not as long as you were gone the first time, but it did stop before Wesley got the adrenaline into her, so..." Angel paused, cell phone pressed awkwardly to one ear. She couldn't see his expression in the rearview mirror, but she knew it was irritated--weird, how he'd adopt one modern convenience without blinking and whine and bitch about another as if it meant the end of the world. "I'm getting off the Ventura now," the vampire said. "We're almost to the city limits."

Angel flipped the phone closed and stuffed it back into a jacket pocket, taking a fresh grip on the steering wheel and sinking back against the seat--he looked morose yet determined, like someone heading for a root canal. Major issue, with the fangs and all. "Hey," Faith said, levering herself up on one elbow and squinting into the endless tunnel of red taillights ahead. "What day is it?"

He looked over the back of the seat with one of the rare genuine smiles that reached his eyes. "Friday. For another few hours. How you feeling?"

Damn. She'd been out for half the day. "I think I'm gonna puke."

"Spike's car. Be my guest."

She would have laughed, but it hurt. Whatever the creeps at the hospital had shot into her, it had locked her up like a full-body charley horse. Even her toes were sore. Adrenaline. Wesley. Her ex-Watcher had saved her life. The Irony Fairy was working overtime. _Sucks to be you, Wes._

A hand reached over the back of the front seat and groped in mid-air for a moment before finding the curve of her forehead in the dark, and cool fingers brushed the sweat-soaked waves of hair aside. "You want me to pull over?"

"Nah." Barfing would hurt as much as laughing. "I wouldn't complain if you rolled down a window or something."

"Sure."

The hand disappeared, and seconds later a river of cold exhaust-flavored air poured into the car. Signs flashed by outside, peppered with corporate hieroglyphs advertising the delights to be found at the next exit--when had they stopped using words, she wondered, and started expecting you to recognize everything by logo? Faith huddled down into her cocoon of blankets. "This is gonna look bad at my next parole hearing."

Angel's reply came from very far away. "On the bright side, you'll be alive to go to it." In only minutes, it seemed, his hands were on her shoulders, shaking gently. "Faith. We're here."

Sit up slowly, carefully... yeah, baby, Faith is locked in the upright position. They were parked in the driveway of the Summers place, and up on the porch two figures were briefly illumined by the glare of the headlights. A couple of hours must have passed, enough to give Slayer healing something to work with; underneath the hospital dressing her ribs itched ferociously and the nausea was gone, leaving lightheaded hunger in its wake. The glimpse of her own face in the rear-view mirror showed eyes sunk deep in the bruised hollows of a too-pale face, but overall she felt remarkably not dead. "We're not staying here, are we?" she asked, trying to keep the apprehension out of her voice.

"Not long," Angel said. "I've got to move the things in the trunk over to my car and I'd like to make sure Spike hasn't put sugar in the gas tank by way of a parting gift." His look towards the porch said volumes, none of it flattering. He extended a hand and Faith climbed stiffly out of the car and stood on the lawn, swaying a little, staring up at the house and rubbing her arms in the cold. The wet was seeping through her thin shoes. When Angel put a supportive arm around her shoulders, she didn't shrug it off.

Buffy was standing backlit on the top step, arms folded. Guardian of the fuckin' threshold, with William the Drop-Dead-Wait-He-Already-Is-Gorgeous at her shoulder, radiating power and confidence and all that shit. Faith stopped at the bottom of the steps, tossed her head and planted her fists on her hips. Bright side, at least she had pants. She could be running around with her ass hanging out of a hospital gown. "Hey. B. Can I use your can before we take off again? Some people don't know the meaning of the words potty break."

Buffy tilted her head to one side, perfect bows arcing over wide eyes. "I notice you make with the walking and talking. This normally means you're not dead, but in present company..."

Faith grinned, betting it was a pretty ghastly expression in her current condition, and rubbed her breastbone. "Present and accounted for, cap'n. Dying wasn't that bad, but coming back hurts like a sonofabitch."

"Luckily Wesley realized what was happening in time," Angel said, rather sourly--annoyed, perhaps, that he hadn't. Sweet, in a broody way. She'd have to let him know it didn't matter--he'd come through for her again, the way he always had; Wesley wouldn't have been there if he hadn't rallied the troops. "The 'nurse' got away and it was too crowded for me to track her--I lost the scent before getting out of the hospital. We've got to assume that she, and possibly a few confederates, are still out there and potentially dangerous."

Buffy gnawed on her lower lip. "Pretty certain that heart stoppage calls the next Slayer in line, but..."

Angel's massive shoulders hunched beneath his coat. "According to Wesley it's not clear how long a Slayer has to be... incapacitated for a new one to be called--"

"So," Spike drawled. "To sum up, Angel knows bugger all. Lovely to have met you all. Can I have my car back now?"

Angel was up the steps with a swift menacing lunge and Spike danced back grinning, with a loose-limbed roll of his shoulders that made you momentarily forget he was only five-eight with his boots on. "Oi, Ref, penalty for unnecessary looming!"

A dead guy, apparently, was still a guy. "You two gonna start pissing on fire hydrants next?" Faith inquired.

Buffy grabbed Spike's elbow with a hiss of annoyance and propelled him forward. "You, him, out." At Spike's disbelieving look, she added, "Go forth. Slobber over your respective cars. Whatever. Do guy-vampire-type things, none of which are to involve staking, burning, beheading, property damage, or excessive drunkenness."

"That cuts out talking football, then." Spike gave Angel the suspicious glare accorded to potential Arsenal supporters. "And while we're re-enacting _The Quiet Man_ without any of the entertaining bits...?"

"Faith and I have girl stuff to talk about. You know. Hair care and evisceration tips. Scoot." Buffy made a little shooing motion with both hands and motioned Faith to follow her inside. She shut the front door on two startled vampire faces and collapsed against it. "I love Spike truly, madly, deeply, but sometimes he really needs a severe killing." She eyed Faith up and down. "You look like crap."

Faith rubbed the back of her head, surreptitiously trying to work a few of the tangles out of her hair. "Goes with the feeling like crap." B. looked fabulous, of course, always did, and here she was in a funky, slept-in mixture of prison blues and hospital scrubs, looking like something the cat hacked up and there's that green-eyed monster licking its chops again. _Down, boy._

Buffy essayed a strained smile. "Bathroom's upstairs. Uh, well, I guess you remember that. There's spaghetti, if you're hungry. There's also furniture. I'm told some people sit on it." Faith nodded, uncertain; there wasn't any glass between them now, but their eyes kept sliding away from each other anyhow. They stood in the foyer without for a long awkward minute before Faith turned and took the stairs as fast as she dared.

The last time she'd been in this house she'd been wearing Buffy's body like a shoplifted Versace. The prints with the doors were still hanging in the stairwell, but the end table at the bottom was different--smashed by something spiny and replaced, probably. It was the same, and it was different. Maybe that was all she needed to know. Buffy didn't follow her up the stairs to guard her while she peed, which was something.

When she got downstairs again Buffy was facing off against Dawn in the kitchen, the two of them arguing in low strained whispers. "...no discussion, Dawn! Just get packed!"

Dawn's mouth set in a grim line. She gave Faith the laser eyeball of death as she hesitated in the doorway, slammed past her and out of the kitchen in a full-blown teenaged huff. Buffy grimaced and began to ladle leftover spaghetti into a bowl, looking, just maybe, a little apologetic. Yeah, fun for the whole family. Faith cleared her throat uneasily. "So. How's your mom?"

All the nascent warmth in Buffy's face evaporated. "Dead. Last year. It seems to run in the family lately."

"Oh." _Fuck._ So much for glorious sisterhood. Had Angel ever mentioned that? Had she just blown it off? "I'm sor--I didn't know. Where's that spaghetti? If my mouth's full I can't put my foot in it."

Even reheated, the spaghetti tasted better than anything she'd eaten in years, and Faith tore into the meal with single-minded intensity--Slayer metabolism had been working overtime today, and Angel tended to forget about the whole needing to eat thing. Buffy drifted around the kitchen with arms tight-folded beneath her breasts, picking up salt shakers and potholders and putting them down again without looking at them. She finally ran aground staring out the window over the sink. Faith prompted at last, "I don't wanna look gift pasta in the mouth, but is there a reason for the fatted calf treatment?"

Buffy looked away from the window, twirling a strand of hair around her forefinger with that big-eyed angstful look she got, the one that said she was bearing up bravely under a terrible fate. About half-way between the stone face of Summers denial and the trembly lip. "Giles found out what causes it," she said. "The potential wonkiness that has the Council spitting tweed bricks. Apparently whoever whipped up the first Slayer was much into the fighting of fire with fire. Whatever power it is we've got that makes us all Chosen? Demon. We're part demon."

"Oh." Faith rested her chin on her hands. "Well, shit. Makes sense, I guess."

Buffy spun on her heel to face her, somewhat miffed that her bombshell had proven to be a dud. "'Oh?' By the way, you're not entirely human, and all I get is an 'oh?' Anticlimax much?"

"Well, what else am I supposed to say?" Truth to tell she felt more stunned than anything else, but damned if she was going to roll over and wallow; she'd had enough of that to last a lifetime. "Fuck, B., we've seen the enemy and she is us--yeah, it's scary. But slapping a label that says 'demon' on my forehead doesn't change anything. I already got labels saying 'jailbird' and 'murderer.'" Faith shrugged. "What's one more? So I got part of a demon squirreled away somewhere, maybe wantin' to mess with my head--it can just take a fucking number and get in line behind my asshole dad and my drunk mom and the undead prick who killed my Watcher and every other piece of coal-black shit that's been thrown at me in the last twenty years. Scared? I feel _sorry_ for the damn thing." She scowled. "I just can't believe that's _it._ This is the big secret? This is why the Council wants me to join the choir infuckinvisible? 'Cause we're part demon? What the hell are they so scared of?"

Buffy snorted. "That we'd go march in the Demon Pride Parade the minute we found out, I guess."

"Huh." Faith rested her chin on clasped hands. "Maybe I would have, once. It's a hell of a lot more fun being a demon than being a Slayer. Letting go. At least..."

"...until the human part of you catches up." Buffy leaned against the kitchen island, looking somber. "But then, it's more fun to be a human than to be a Slayer, too. I _hate_ this."

"Being a Slayer? You don't have to. My gig now. Once I'm a contributing member of society again and all. Hey, is there any more garlic bread? Did you know Angel's got a whole freaking restaurant kitchen in that hotel of his, and they all live on take-out burritos?"

"There's more in the oven. No, not being a Slayer. I'm kind of...semi-annual apocalypse aside, lately it doesn't entirely suck, being a Slayer. Probably because lately it doesn't entirely suck being a Buffy." A frown sketched a small precise line between Buffy's brows. "It's just... if I didn't know anything else, I always thought I knew who I was. What I was. The work I had to do. And now I find out it's all been a lie."

"No, it's _not._" Faith dropped her fork with a clatter, surprised at her own vehemence. "I don't give a shit if we're human or demon or the Great Gazoo. What we do--that's real."

Buffy regarded her for a moment with something like...respect? then gave her a brief nod, acknowledging the point. "If Giles is right, this demon thing's always been part of us. Our ticket in the Chosen One sweepstakes. Becoming the Slayer just wakes it up." She fell silent for a moment. "It explains a lot. And it doesn't explain anything--how did it get into the Slayer line to begin with? How's it passed on? Do the Powers That Be reach down and zap unsuspecting baby girls with demon juice, or is it some X-Files thing with aliens injecting the First Slayer with demon DNA? Was Mom one of us? Is Dawn? Giles says there's dozens, maybe hundreds of potential Slayers--why does one get picked and another not? The Council's known this stuff all along, and they've kept it from us. That whole aspect of the demon thing in high school? Wiggy enough waiting to grow horns or a tail, but ha ha, joke's on me, I already had one!" Anger began edging out the bitterness in her voice. "And let's not go into the years of obsessing over whether I'm a whack job for getting off on the slaying."

Faith ran a finger around the rim of her bowl and licked off the spaghetti sauce. Would things have been different, with one less voice whispering _bad sick wrong_ in her ear? Probably not, but you couldn't help wondering. Unnerving to hear Buffy Summers admitting to the same kinds of fear. "You were always in control."

"Oh, yeah, I was Control Girl." Buffy picked viciously at a worn spot on the Formica. "Lying awake nights, trying to make the sweaty Angel thoughts disappear by going out and dusting one more vamp--I envied you so much."

That earned her a stare. "You envied _me?_" Faith finally looked up, tucked her hair back, and met her fellow Slayer's eyes. Weird to think back--was it only three years ago?--and remember that year, she herself spiraling out of control as Buffy wound tighter and tighter. "That's a kick and a half."

"You made handling the Slayerness look so easy, with your unstoppable force thing--well, until the whole murderous psychotic break." She gave a fierce little shake of her head. "If I'd known from the beginning... at least I'd've known _why_ I felt things that...God, poor Riley." She tucked one hand under her chin, toying with the skull ring on its chain. "He had no clue. I had no clue. We lived in a clue-free zone."

"He was..." Faith stopped, wondering just how much scab she could afford to pull off this particular wound. "He was a really nice guy."

Buffy pulled out a nostalgic smile, as for a favorite childhood toy. "Yeah. Yeah, he was."

"Nice can be nice."

"Relaxing."

Couldn't help bringing a bit of sly in here, could she? "But not to be compared to the pony ride the bleached bombshell can give you?"

Buffy actually grinned back. Caught off-guard, maybe. "Comparisons are tacky," she said with a prim little toss of her head.

"Y'know...B..." Was there any way to say this without sounding pathetic? Probably not. "That last time in L.A.--I was never trying to...to steal him, y'know? Angel, I mean. It's just--he believes in me." God, how much lamer could she sound? "Nobody ever did that before. And--"

"You couldn't," Buffy interrupted. "Steal him. I never had him to be stolen. Not really. I know that now." She twirled the ring with a small rueful smile. "I loved him. I loved him so much I can't even describe it, but sometimes I think that from the minute we met we were walking away from each other." Her eyes strayed to the window again, though Faith could barely feel the vampiric presence out in the yard at this distance. "It's funny. I know Spike's favorite band and his favorite books and favorite soccer team and the street he was born on and the name of the cousin who dunked him in a rain barrel when he was eight and why he talked Drusilla out of eating Billy Idol and that he leaves the cap off the toothpaste no matter how often I yell at him--I never knew Angel like that. We never... we never really talked about ordinary stuff."

"Angel's not much with the talk, small or otherwise," Faith agreed. After a minute she plunged forward with, "I'm with you on the talking thing, 'cause I was thinking--we're the only Slayers in history that have the chance to. Talk. To each other." _We were almost friends once. Almost sisters. Cain and Abel in drag._

Buffy's expression went guarded. "So you're saying maybe we ought to exploit the historic opportunity and talk sometimes?"

Faith made her shrug as nonchalant as possible. "Just sayin'. I'd like to find out for sure if the Council's still got a bullseye painted on my ass, see if I'm gonna be doing a Richard Kimble or virtuously turning myself in to the LAPD again."

"Yeah, about that." Buffy's eyes narrowed. "I don't know about you, but taking time out to paper-train the Reservoir Dogs is putting a crimp in my social life. We're the only Slayers, but--see above--we're not the only possible Slayers in this best of all possible worlds. I think Giles even has a list. With e-mail addresses. So how far would Quentin Travers's head spin around on his shoulders if we started giving the next generation the benefit of our wisdom and experience? If all of a sudden every potential Slayer in the world found out exactly what she was?"

"Blackmail?" Faith leaned back with a big lazy tiger-grin. "Hey, I prefer violence, but with an ocean in the way and plane tickets through the roof..."

"Blackmail is such a sleazy word. I prefer to think of it as a threat. If they don't back off and let us kick vampire ass in peace and quiet--" Buffy smiled back, and it wasn't a pleasant expression. "Then the truth will be out there. All over the place. And then--"

Upstairs, something went smash, and Buffy's face went white.

*****

Dawn pulled another sweater out of the drawer and scrunched it up with vicious disregard for whether or not it matched any of the half-dozen pairs of pants laid out on the bed. _That's Buffy._ She stuffed it into her suitcase and reached for another one. Fold, spindle, skip the mutilation--couldn't afford to poke holes in anything. _That's Willow._ But she wasn't going to be a little kid about it, no--she wouldn't give Buffy the satisfaction. She'd be all packed and ready the minute her sister decided to kick her out. _Stupid end of the world._

Angel and Spike down in the front yard, jealously inspecting their cars for damage and snarking at each other. No love lost there. She could catch a word here and there when they got loud enough. _Stupid Buffy-whipped vampire. He could have stuck up for her, but no, Buffy says frog, Spike asks how high he should jump. Buffy'd better be _really_ good at the sex thing because--_

Something scraped against the shingles, barely audible over the renewed patter of rain. Was Miss Kitty still out? Dawn walked over to the window and pressed her nose to the cold glass, but all she could see was rain-filled darkness and the tangled branches of the oak tree off to one side. Farther away street lights glowed in the darkness, glittering with a million fugitive gems as raindrops passed through the aura of light around each one. Her breath was starting to fog up the windowpane, and she undid the latch and heaved the window up. "Miss Kitty? Here girl! Come on in, meaning the cat and not any random vampires in hearing distance!"

If the cat was out there, she wasn't risking a dash to the window from wherever she was hiding. Behind her, the suitcase she'd left balancing precariously on the edge of her bed slid off and hit the floor with a thump, spilling socks out onto the floor. "Crap," Dawn muttered, turning away from the window and bending down to pick it up. She really ought to fold all this stuff properly if--

An arm snaked around her waist, pulling her back against a thin ragged torso and pinning her arms. A hand clamped over her mouth from behind. Dammit, this wasn't fair, she specifically _hadn't_ invited anyone in! Dawn screamed, the noise muffled by the pressure of cold wet fingers, and thrashed violently in her captor's grasp. She could tell immediately that this wasn't a vampire; she could actually make some headway against his grip. A frantic voice hissed in her ear, "Quiet! Be quiet! I'm not going to hurt you, little girl! Please just shut up!"

Dawn ignored him and kept struggling, wishing desperately that Spike had had time to teach her that neck-snapping thing. "Let me go!" she screeched, or more accurately, "Lm muh gmh!" The whole thing was a horrible replay of Ben dragging her off to the tower, but she was half a year older and several inches taller now--yay, growth spurts!--and at least she could make things hard on whoever this was. She flailed back backwards with one foot, trying to find a vulnerable toe, and sank her teeth into the flesh of the man's palm. Her captor yelled louder than she had, overbalanced and planted one foot in her suitcase, which snapped shut on his ankle. He staggered into the dresser, pulling her with him. The open drawer slid out and hit the floor with a crash.

There was a immediate thunder of feet in the stairwell, and a lean, pale blur shot up over the edge of the porch roof and dove through the open window in a flurry of wet leaves and rain--Spike in full game face, fangs bared, roaring mad. The man screamed and let Dawn drop as her bedroom door burst off its hinges and her sister appeared in the gap, eyes blazing. A heartbeat later Buffy'd grabbed a handful of wet, grimy t-shirt and hoisted the intruder a foot off the floor, slamming him up against the wall and ripping Dawn's Justin Timberlake poster off its thumbtacks. "What do you want with my sister?" Buffy snarled, quite as fearsome as Spike, if slightly less flamboyant about it.

"She sent me to get the girl, please don't kill me, oh, God, I just want to go home, please let me go home..." The man--it was one of the guys from the alley, Dawn could see now, the one in the blue baseball cap--writhed against the wall like a pinned butterfly awaiting the camphor, blubbering pitiably. Buffy's gaze and the pressure of her fingers against his throat remained merciless, wringing torrents of words from him along with the tears. "She's in my head now all the time, I gotta do it, they took Bench away and we haven't seen him since and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please don't, I didn't wanna hurt her, I don't wanna die!"

Dawn stumbled over to the bed. There were muddy sneaker prints all over her clothes where Blue Cap had stepped in her suitcase, and for some reason this was way more disasterous than the attack. Faith and Angel were right behind Buffy now, crowding the door of her room, with Tara wide-eyed in the hall behind them. Spike crouched at her side, his golden eyes brimming with wordless concern. His nostrils flared--snuffing the air for blood, she realized, to see if she were injured. "I'm fine," she said. Why was she shivering? She'd been kidnaped by hellgods; this was nothing. "I'm--"

Spike put an arm around her shoulders and all of a sudden she was sobbing stupidly into his chest, like the little kid she absolutely wasn't, while he pressed his hideously beautiful demon-face into the top of her head and made comforting growly noises. "'S all right, love, we've got him."

"I hate this! I hate it!" Dawn pounded an ineffectual fist against his shoulder. "I just sit here while people c-come and--"

"Hush, you didn't sit. Drew first blood, you did--look at his hand, there; couldn't have taken a better chunk out of him myself. Come on." He rose to his feet, drawing her up with him. "Let's us give your sis room to work."

She followed Spike downstairs and sat on the couch, hugging her knees and staring at the now completely fake Christmas tree. There was some kind of weird kinship there--she was fake too, just made to seem real for awhile. Spike disappeared into the kitchen and re-emerged a few minutes later carrying a mug. A cloud of fragrant steam hit her nose as he pressed it into her hands, and Dawn wrapped her fingers around the slick ceramic and let the warmth seep into her bones--hot chocolate vampire style, made with a flotilla of mini-marshmallows and enough cocoa powder to leave a thick sweet sludge in the bottom. She took a sip and felt the inner numbness start to thaw.

Angel padded downstairs as Spike picked up the phone. "What are you doing?"

"What's it look like?" Spike punched out 911 and flopped down on the couch beside Dawn.

"Since when do you call the police?"

"Since my girls'd object to my draining the bastard and leaving his corpse on the lawn for the mailman to trip over," Spike replied. "Assuming Buffy leaves him in pieces large enough for me to get a fang in. Yeh. Got a break-in. 1630 Revello Drive. No, he's cornered. No gun."

The heavy line of Angel's brow dipped lower over his dark eyes. "Did it occur to you that I've got a fugitive in tow?"

Spike hung up and blinked, mouth falling open in mock horror. "You mean--you'd have to leave early? Bloody hell. Never entered my mind."

Angel and Faith made themselves scarce before the squad car arrived; there'd been no mention of Faith's disappearance on the news, but no one wanted to take chances. Buffy turned on the charm for the officers, smiling, batting her eyelashes--it was _so_ lucky that Spike had been here, and that she'd taken that self-defense class. Dawn answered questions--no, she didn't know the suspect, she might have seen him panhandling once or twice downtown, she'd never spoken to him before and didn't know of any motive for the attack. Spike, absolutely lapping up the opportunity to be the Supportive Boyfriend in public, hovered over both of them to the point that Buffy almost thwapped him a couple of times.

"...don't think there's any point in pressing charges, he's obviously a little..." Buffy twirled a finger beside her temple. "I mean, claiming a vampire chased him through the window? Right."

"Yeh, ridiculous," Spike chimed in. "Stray vamp couldn't get in without an invite."

Buffy elbowed him in the ribs. The officers exchanged looks and the larger of the two handed her a sheaf of papers. "If you change your mind, ma'am, call this number."

Tara managed to slip out to the back yard to be sure the talisman powering the spellcloak was still intact wile Buffy ushered the policemen out. Dawn stayed where she was, too tired to move; it was almost two in the morning. Buffy shut the front door and the company smile fell away in an instant; she looked small and fragile and tired, and Dawn was immediately sorry about the sweater voodoo. Her sister tucked her feet up on the couch and laid her head on Spike's shoulder with a yawn. "We've got to get you some fake ID," she said. "I don't think 'I left my wallet in England' is all that convincing."

"Had a perfectly good set last week, and Harris made me toss it back," Spike grumbled, slouching down and wrapping an arm around Buffy. "And speaking of people I can't eat, what're we going to do with that lot from the Council? I'd like my crypt back at some point, and Clem'll only watch 'em as long as the Cheezy Poofs hold out."

"'M working on that." Buffy stifled another yawn. "Got an idea. Talk to Giles about it tomorrow."

"Is Angel coming back?" Dawn asked. "I can get packed if..."

"No," Spike said, at the same instant Buffy said "Maybe." They glared at each other, ruffled, and then Buffy laughed and kissed him on the nose, one of those sudden just-because gestures that always made Spike's eyes go all melty and adoring--some Big Bad. "You don't need to pack."

"It's OK," Dawn said. She still felt strangely listless. "Look, I get it now. I'm the McGuffin. Again. As long as I'm around someone's always going to be storming the castle. FedEx me off to Alaska or wherever."

Buffy sat up a little straighter, pressing her lips together, and studied Dawn's face for a moment, "No. I'm going to need you here."

Hope and dread did a Matrix in Dawn's stomach. This couldn't be right. "You're letting me--?"

"Leap headlong into terrible danger? More like a bunny hop. With all of us right behind you. I've been in the Hellmouth. Partway, anyhow--not as far as the actual Hell part, and it was... vertical, but survivable. We'll have to break out the rappelling gear."

"That was a sight for sore eyes." Spike looked misty. "You climbing out over that rubble with that scabby-looking bloke under one arm..."

Buffy looked puzzled. "I left the dead demon by the Hellmouth."

"I meant Finn."

Buffy gave him a dirty look and turned back to Dawn. "You're going to be with Tara at all times if one of us isn't around--I'll think of something to tell the school. It's table-turning time. We're going to make Willow scramble for a change. She may have the tunnels all funhouse mirror-y, but that just means we need to kick a little glass. The Harbingers have this whole brown thumb thing going. Tomorrow we start scouring town for crop circles of the dead grass variety, and dig our way in if we have to. Then we start picking off minions. Once we whittle down Willow's stable of hit-creatures, she'll have to come after you up close and personal."

She took a deep breath and reached across Spike's chest to smooth Dawn's hair away from her cheek. "I love you, Dawnie, and I'll do anything I can to keep you safe, but I _never_ want you to feel like--I want you to feel protected, not helpless. Because you're not. You're brave, and I--" Buffy hesitated. "I need to let you be brave. The monks made you out of me, and sometimes it feels like--but you're not. I'm proud of you, Dawn. Mom would be proud of you. Tara'll have to come up with some kind of protection spell for you--the Hellmouth's murder on your T-zone. The red-hot minute we get Willow where we want her, you will run like the fiends of Hell are on your tail, which they might just be. No heroics."

"I--" Dawn swallowed. _Never tell a vampire they can come over any time, never say 'I wish' in front of a vengeance demon, and never tell the Slayer you only want to help._ "I won't let you down. I promise." She sat there for a minute, the enormity of what she'd agreed--heck, what she'd begged--to do starting to sink in. She'd wanted to be something more than wasn't Buffy's stupid little sister, but the position looked a lot more attractive when she wasn't in it. Still, as long as Buffy was in the mood-- "So... about that learner's permit?"


	35. Chapter 35

The Internet was a wonderful thing.

Some older Watchers scorned it, but Quentin Travers was a pragmatist, if an aesthetically minded one. No cords or monitors or CPUs marred the oak-paneled, leatherbound dignity of his study, but in less hallowed areas of the building they had their place. Less than an hour ago, the color printout on his desk had been a hash of data in a digital camera in Sunnydale, California. Half an hour ago it had been scanned, panned, and fed across the globe to qtravers@watcherscouncil.org, and fifteen minutes ago his aide Rumson had delivered it to his desk in glorious full color photoprint.

Travers added it to the photos already gracing his desk, placing them side by side on the blotter--a pictorial history of Buffy Anne Summers and the vampire William the Bloody over the last six weeks. Since the debacle of Buffy's Cruciamentum, he had known that to keep proper tabs on this particular Slayer, the Council would have to resort to subtler channels than the usual Watcher's reports. Fortunately the Hellmouth was a hotbed of demon gossip with no dearth of residents who'd willingly pass it on for a suitable remuneration.

Travers allowed himself the unobserved luxury of rubbing his eyes as he studied the newest photograph. The picture was grainy and marred by motion blurs. In the background, a group of indistinct figures struggled against the whitewashed side of a building; in the foreground Buffy Summers balanced on the hood of a black sedan, stake plunging into the chest of a vampire caught on film in mid-dissolution. Her undead paramour was a smudge of black and ivory on the opposite side of the car. He checked the date stamp in the corner. Slayer and vampire at large on the streets of Sunnydale at 11:43 PM, Pacific Standard Time.

Losing the chance to get the Summers girl into Council hands was a disappointment, but then, he'd expected Angelus to betray his side of the agreement. Now the only thing for it was to wait--wait, and hope. At any minute the Search Committee might identify a new Slayer, and Buffy Summers would become, for the time being at least, irrelevant. The phone rang, and he snatched up the receiver before it could mar the quiet of his sanctum a second time. "Travers."

"Good evening," said a chilly voice on the opposite side of the Atlantic. "Though I daresay I wasn't intended to have one, so I rather grudge you yours."

"Rupert? I'm... surprised to hear from you. I thought our last conversation was rather final. Have you reconsidered?"

"Giles, if you please; I reserve my Christian name for people who haven't ordered me killed in the last forty-eight hours. Perhaps you recall the subject of my recent researches?"

"There's been little else on my mind lately." Travers leaned back in his chair, the fine leather upholstery creaking softly beneath his shifting weight. "I never planned on killing you, Giles. Surely you know me well enough for that."

"We both know one another very well." The proffered olive branch was, if not precisely flung back in his face with the dove of peace roasting over its ashes, roundly ignored. "In the last week I've amassed considerable evidence that the Slayer's powers are of demonic origin."

"Indeed?" Travers fenced his words about with caution. "Given what you've discovered, I'm sure you realize exactly why we're willing to take measures which might, under other circumstances, be considered extreme? You swore an oath, Giles. You know the consequences of breaking it."

"That oath was to protect the world first, and serve the Council second." Giles's voice was a drawn rapier. "At present it's my considered opinion that the latter is incompatible with the former. You're attempting to summon a new Slayer, one you can mold more to your liking than either of the current models. I am hardly a squeamish man, and there are some cases in which I might call your actions justified. This is far from being one of them. You have two working Slayers, and there is no excuse for resorting to murder simply because they are both inconveniently stubborn. Consider my resignation tendered." There was a brief pause. "Buffy would like to speak to you."

"Hey, Mr. Travers." The loathsomely perky California accent should have robbed the words of all menace. "Just calling to congratulate you on your spanky new Slayer."

"Miss Summers." Travers pressed the discreet button which summoned Rumson. "I suppose you're going to offer me the lives of my men now?"

"That would be a no."

Dead, then. Irritating. The only question was at whose hands. "What did you do to them?"

"Personally? Nothing. Mr. Smith's enjoying the spacious accomodations at the local precinct house. The breaking and entering and assault charges ought to keep him occupied for awhile. Mr. Weatherby and Mr. Collins are under house arrest, so to speak. You can talk to them if you'd like."

Not dead, then. Surprising. "If you please."

There was a scuffling noise, and then Collins's hoarse voice rasped out, "Travers? Is that really you?"

"The same, Mr. Collins." Travers drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. This was the second Slayer-related operation Collins had bollocksed up. "Even bearing in mind that the primary purpose of this mission was to distract, I am less than pleased with the results you've obtained."

"The bloody vampire was supposed to be neutered!" Collins snarled, dissolving into a cough.

The phone was snatched away and Buffy's too-perky tones overrode Collins's ire. "Chat time over. Want to talk to Weatherby now? I think he can talk. Spike got a smidge over-enthusiastic, but under the circumstances, I'm having a hard time bringing the moral outrage."

Rumson appeared in the doorway of the study, and Travers motioned him over to the desk. Quivery and inoffensive as the White Rabbit, Rumson, until you put a throwing dagger in those long nervous hands. "Miss Summers, I'm a busy man. If you're not intending to trade my employees' lives for... whatever compensation it is you've determined you desire, might I ask what the purpose of this call is? What do you want from me?" On his notepad he wrote HAVE THEY FOUND HER YET? Rumson blinked watery blue eyes beneath near-invisible eyebrows, and dashed his hopes with a mournful shake of the head.

The banter dropped out of Buffy's voice like the bottom out of technologies stocks. "I'm not asking you for anything, Travers. I'm telling you what you get. Smith's going to stay in jail and meet his court date. Angel and Faith will be picking up and delivering Weatherby and Collins to LAX tonight. They'll have their passports and whatever money they have left after Anya deducts our expenses for food, board, and medical care. They will get on a plane to England along with their L.A. partners in crime, and we will never see them again--them, or any other member of the Council. And just in case you have some idea that six months from now you can point Spanky in our general direction and tell her to come back with her dress shield or on it? They say knowledge is power. Faith and I talked it over and we think a brand new Slayer needs all the power she can get."

Travers sighed. "What are you implying, Miss Summers?"

"Just keeping score here. Faith's not happy, Spike's not happy, Angel's not happy...oh, and me? I'm not too happy, either. That's one junior Slayer, two moderately nasty vampires, and the senior Slayer who's kicked all three of their asses. Fair to poor under-informed Spanky? I don't think so. The minute I think you're after us again, every single potential Slayer in the world is gonna get a copy of Giles's research, all condensed down to words of one syllable. Got it?"

"Miss Summers..." She was bluffing; she had to be. Rupert Giles might have contact addresses available for most of the potential Slayers in training, but historically, the Council had failed to identify almost half of all Slayers called until their powers manifested. Still--fifty percent of the pool of potential Slayers polluted... "...believe me, I have as little desire to deal with you in the future as you have to deal with me." There was a knock at his door and Travers looked up, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Rumson popped up in the doorway, skittered over to Travers's desk, and handed him a memo. One short sentence. Two small words.

Found her.

One by one the knots in Travers's gut unraveled. _Yes._ He scarcely heard the conciliatory words falling from his own lips as he smoothed the paper across the mess of photos on the blotter and traced that glorious word _found_ with loving attention. He took a deep breath and sank back into his chair, hanging up the phone without the slightest idea what he'd agreed to--none of that mattered now. Disaster had been averted for the moment.

The Summers girl thought she'd won--it was true; he couldn't afford to unloose the serpent in the garden now. Not now, and not until the Council's new instrument had been contacted, indoctrinated, and properly trained. It might take years, but the Council, unlike any of the mere mortals who made it up, had time.

All the time in the world.

*****

Buffy stepped back and squinted at the precarious Jenga-tower of bags and boxes with the aplomb of a veteran, rose up on tiptoe, and made a minute adjustment to the position of the Gap bag. Spike's eye, blue and sardonic, appeared in the arrow-slit between it and the Imaginarium box. "You know, love, if I were the uncharitable sort, at some point I'd remind you that you're stronger than I am."

"I am the girl," Buffy replied with serene aplomb, beckoning him onwards with an imperious quirk of one finger. "You are the guy. I shop, you transport. It's the circle of life."

"We're fast getting to the part of the circle where I collapse and they find my cold dead body buried under a pile of Lion King memorabilia," Spike grumbled, but there was a grin tugging at his lips even as he spoke. He'd spent most of the afternoon setting his crypt to rights again, and after a good stiff workout with Buffy at the Magic Box, he'd expected they'd do an early patrol. Instead (after a shared shower during which a few other things got good and stiff) she'd promptly dragged him off to do what Slayers did third-best. Or perhaps second best; Buffy Summers was as keen at spotting a half-off rack of Donna Karan as she was at taking out a vamp with a thrown stake at twenty paces. He hadn't been on a serious feminine shopping expedition since San Francisco, the first week after meeting Harmony, during that brief moment of whiskey-fueled insanity when he'd decided that a clingy, brainlessly adoring chit was exactly what his ego needed in order to recover from the bruises inflicted by Drusilla dropping him like a hot crucifix for the second or third time in as many years. Of course, the current occasion was a bit lacking in the trail of screaming and eviscerated clerks department, but it was surprising how little that detracted from the experience.

This close to Christmas, Sunnydale Mall was still crowded at eight o'clock on a Monday night. The stores were packed and both levels of the promenade were a-swirl with people--old, young, pale faces and dark ones, talking, laughing, cursing, children jostling in line to see Santa. The fact that she wasn't one of the salesgirls swimming against the human tide seemed to cheer Buffy no end. Spike followed blindly in her wake as she plotted her lines of attack from storefront to storefront, and did his best to ignore the hopeful hints his stomach was sending brain-wards while the blood, sweat, and tears of multifarious humanity assailed his nose. _Should have grabbed some pig earlier. I can be good. I can. Oooh, that one looks tasty..._

Funny, though, how many of the faces in the crowd were ones he recognized. There, the pimply kid with his britches hanging off his arse, hanging out in the doorway to the Virgin Megastore and pretending to be cool for the benefit of a pair of giggly eighth-grade girls. Dawn's friend's Lisa's brother, that one--couldn't rightly eat him. There were a couple of the birds he'd caught a glimpse of at Anya's party, lost among the shoe racks in Ross Dress For Less. The wrinkly old bint berating a mall security guard was the elder Mrs. Kohlermann, and there in the Kay-Bee Toys was that bloke from Xander's work, staring with hopeless bewilderment at the ranks of Buzz Lightyears. You couldn't really eat someone you'd been introduced to. _Pudding, Alice. Alice, pudding._ Well, you could--not like he hadn't before, but how far would he have to go, these days, to find a victim he could kill without a second thought? "Oi, Dawn'd look smashing in that one, eh pet?" He jerked his chin in the general direction of a display window, that being the only part of his body free at the moment.

Buffy gave the mannequins the once-over, her uncanny retail powers divining the precise sweater he'd indicated, despite his invisibility behind the wall of purchases. "It'll be marked down another twenty percent by Saturday. We'll come back."

"Someone else might get paws on it first, love, and then Bit'd be disappointed and I'd have to kill them, so buying it now's a step towards keeping me on the straight and narrow, innit? Come on, the bank book can handle it." Never mind the world might be ending Friday; it was coming on Christmas, and if that wasn't a reason for indulging...

Buffy hesitated for a second, her eyes on the blue and silver beadwork spangling the sweater's yoke, obviously wavering between maintaining her hard-won frugality and the yearning to splurge for the first time in almost a year. Another second and she plunged into the holiday melee, cutting out a saleswoman with the finesse of a border collie corralling a recalcitrant sheep. Spike leaned against the nearest counter and watched Buffy at work with a smile that wouldn't have been entirely out of place on the face of the man he'd once been. Times like this, he could almost appreciate what Anya saw in money. It wasn't the same kick as strolling into a store, taking what you liked and killing anyone who objected and a few who didn't, but purchasing power had its allure, especially when you'd gone for a while without it.

Buffy emerged from the fray with the bright eyes and triumphant grin of victory, clutching yet another bag which she managed somehow to hang off a corner of his existing load. "I think that's it for tonight." Unable to put an arm round him with the bags in the way, Buffy tucked one hand into the rear pocket of his jeans, branding a nice toasty palmprint on his arse. "I don't want to blow the whole bankbook on presents, now that there's actually a bankbook to blow." She grinned, nose wrinkling adorably. "Besides, I can't get your presents while you're hanging around watching me like a hawk."

Presents, plural? He'd lined up a few things for her, of course, but he hadn't really expected... Spike juggled a few boxes, attempting innocence and ending up in the general vicinity of bouncy anticipation. "Not as if I can see anything right now but the backside of a sales receipt, pet."

"Unh uh. Don't work your sinister attraction on me, mister. It's gonna be a secret." She gave him a playful smack on the rump. "Let's stow the loot and get dinner before you start drooling on the mezzanine."

It was while they were cramming the last of the bags into the rear of the Cherokee that Buffy noticed it. "Hey." She nudged him in the ribs. "Spike, was that tree like that when we got here?"

Spike glanced up from the Rubik's Cube of packages inhabiting the back half of the Jeep and frowned. The parking lot was a vast expanse of asphalt broken up by random islands of cement-enclosed greenery, spindly, sad-looking acacia trees and scraggly dwarf oleander. Several of them were dead or dying, victims of the water crunch, but he was moderately certain that the ones nearest the car hadn't been among them. "Doesn't mean they're still down there, love--how long does it take the weedkilling mojo to set in?"

"I'm not sure." Buffy walked over to the island and fingered the sere thorny branches of the acacia. A shower of tiny brown leaves fluttered to the ground as she let the branch go. "But it's more than we found last night, right?"

True; Sunday's patrol had been a repeat of Saturday's; complete bust, redeemed only by the unaccountable absence of further Willow-machinations. Which probably meant only that Red was up to something on the sly, now. "Where's the nearest sewer access, over on Ballantine? I don't fancy burrowing through a foot of macadam with my fingernails."

"We could go home and get a shovel--wait, is that--?"

Spike slammed the Cherokee's tailgate shut and followed Buffy over to the small, unassuming grid of dull gray steel set in one of the low spots in the pavement--part of the parking lot's drainage system. He dropped to his haunches beside her and eyed it dubiously; it was less than half the size of the one they'd crawled down chasing Tanner's lot. Buffy met his eyes, hooked her fingers into the slots and heaved; the grate came up with a clang. "Here goes nothing," she murmured, and shimmied down into the darkness.

Spike waited for a second, ears cocked, until he heard a splash and an 'oof!' He swung both legs into the drain, raised both arms over his head and pushed himself off. For a second he fell free; then the shaft narrowed further and he came to a jolting halt, shoulders wedged tight against the damp gritty walls of the drain. Bloody hell. This was what came of living healthy; a few months ago he'd have scraped through. A hand groped his calf, then wrapped firmly around his ankle and tugged. He forced all the air out of his lungs, and fell another five or six feet to the bottom of the shaft. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he realized that they were in a natural cave rather than a sewer tunnel--apparently the construction crew building the parking lot had decided to shave a little off their costs. The floor of the tunnel was still inches deep in oily water, runoff from the recent rains.

Buffy was crouching motionless beside him, shoulders rigid. Spike tuned out her heartbeat and listened: echoes of lapping water, underground creaks and gurgles, and--there. He touched her shoulder and pointed; the sound of multiple sloshing footsteps. As one, they faded back against the tunnel walls and slipped closer to the noise, dark water purling about their ankles like liquid silk.

The cavern was long and low-ceilinged, patchily illuminated by phosphorescent lichen. A knot of dark-robed figures made their surefooted way through the water, never pausing, never stumbling, guided by eldritch senses surer in the dark than any vampire's. Each of them sported a short, curved blade at his hip--that was new; apparently the previous dust-ups had taught them a thing or two. They were carrying some sort of contraption, a pole decorated with a flayed, bloody hide--human, Spike could tell from the smell of the congealing blood--stitched back together and stuffed with something foul. The stink of black magic almost drowned out the stench of uncured skin.

Buffy's body jerked against his, and her fingers dug hard into his shoulder--bloody hell, this would be hard on her, wouldn't it? She'd feel for the bastard, whoever he was. Spike was grateful to be unburdened by compassion; just the physical stink of the thing was enough to make him want to heave. Buffy looked up at him, pale green fire glinting in her eyes, and behind it a question clear as speaking: six of them, armed, two of us, not. Except it wasn't really a question at all, was it, seeing that his answer was writ just as plain in his sharklike grin, and she knew it before she'd asked.

They shot out of the darkness in utter silence, Buffy going low, Spike going high, striking their targets in perfect, deadly synchrony. Spike blocked a slash from the Bringer's wicked little knife with his right forearm and drove his left fist into his target's ribcage with his whole weight behind the blow, feeling bones crunch and shatter and lungs collapse. Beside him Buffy'd ripped her opponent's knife from his belt before he could draw it; the blade flashed up and down again, eerie half-light bleeding along the cresent edge. The Harbinger went down with a scream, hamstrung; the heady metallic scent of not-quite-human blood flooded the cavern. Then they were back to back, just him and Buffy surrounded by the remaining four Bringers, the advantage of surprise gone, and it was sheer brutal punch and kick and bash heads into walls till Buffy took another one down and he snapped the neck of a fourth.

The last two Harbingers dropped the scarecrow thing they carried and ran, splashing awkwardly through the water with their sodden robes tangling about their knees. Spike sprinted after, leaping clear of the water and landing on his fleeing target's back, arms flung in a chokehold round its neck. His fangs tore deep into the juncture of neck and shoulder, ripping through muscle and tendon and rendering its knife arm useless. The Harbinger wailed and staggered as Spike gagged on inhuman ichor; the thing's blood tasted like motor oil tinged with battery acid. His prey collapsed beneath him, shock and blood loss glazing its eyeless face as the hood fell away and it bubbled out its last breath. Spike rolled off and watched with interest; you could drown in two inches of water, all those child safety ads claimed, but he'd never seen it happen before. Bloody brilliant.

Buffy drove her purloined blade into the gut of the last Bringer and yanked it out, the curved tip drawing a glistening loop of intestine with it, delivered a straight-legged kick to its jaw and danced back, ready to pounce if it wasn't dead yet. For a long tense minute they stood back to back, watching, listening, and in Spike's case sniffing for clues, but the only sounds were the gradually diminishing slap of the waves the fight had stirred up and their own breathing.

"What is that... thing?" Revulsion thickened Buffy's voice as she edged over to the abandoned... whatever it was. Spike sloshed over and knelt to examine it; this close, he could see that the skin hadn't belonged to a Bringer; except for the cuts made during the clumsy flensing, the eyelids were intact. "Is it for some kind of spell?"

"Dunno, but whoever it was died within the last couple of days. Skin's not been salted like we did with the Sluorn hide--see here? It's starting to decay already." Spike started to roll the thing over and stopped, hand half-way to the puffy, distended shoulder. Three days ago this had been a walking, talking human being. He forced himself to reach out and touch the clammy, flabby hide. There, no different from a thousand other dead things. Buffy clapped a hand to her mouth as the grotesquely distorted features surged up out of the oily water, and Spike looked up at her, anxious. "You all right, love? Not winning any beauty contests, this bloke."

Buffy swallowed and nodded, bending over to study the pale, distended face, committing it to memory. Spike gazed down with her, plagued by a strange itchy annoyance. He hadn't anything so human as grief or guilt or outrage to spend on total strangers, and the fact of messy, painful death didn't bother him in the slightest, but one of the people in the town he'd come to call home wasn't there any longer. The idea that Willow had been involved gave him a queer turn. "Isn't supposed to be this way, is it?" He poked at the skin-doll. Drusilla would have loved it, wanted a whole set for tea parties. And he'd have cheerfully gotten her one, brought her a whole family to play with, Mama, Papa, and two-point-five children. The point-five child still struck him as funny. "Will doing...that. She's supposed to be--dunno, better than I am, right? You all are." _I count on you being better than I am._

"Sometimes I wonder." Buffy rose with a shudder, folding her arms across her belly. "It may be evidence, but I'm not touching it. Do you have your lighter with you?"

Mystified, Spike felt in his back pocket and produced the Zippo. Buffy took it, flicked it to life, and crouched down, extending one hand to set the tiny blue flame to the skin-doll at the furthest possible remove. For all the thing was soaking wet, the fire caught immediately, and the cavern began to fill with oily smoke. Buffy stood and handed him the lighter, her jaw set and hard. "Come on, let's get out of here."

*****

The bronzed man in the quetzal-feather headdress and the cloak of flayed human skin walked out of the wall and stared at her, his dark eyes full of contempt. "Cíhuatl. Acattopa Achtontli?"

Willow lay on her cot and ignored him, and after a moment the apparition snorted, twirled its obsidian-studded war club and disappeared. Willow continued her listless inspection of the ceiling. They kept coming--the tall, grey-bearded man with the eyepatch and his small, thin, fox-sly companion; the woman in the blue cloak, crowned in radiance; the fat man with too many arms and an elephant's head; and countless others, flickering in and out of existence but always and ever spiraling inexorably towards the hell-born omphalos of Sunnydale. Gods or spirits or demons living above their station--in the end they were small potatoes. They were a reflection of human desires and hopes and fears, and she was working for--no, with--something bigger than all of them, older than all of them.

For all the good it did her.

She saw the old man's face all the time now, raw and bleeding, in the grain of the timbers shoring up the fractured ceiling of the main cavern, in the random scuff marks in the sand of its floor. In the faces of his comrades, whose eyes followed her accusingly. In the darkness behind her own eyelids, where nothing was ever still and quiet any longer.

_ **Get up.** _

Willow ignored the voice. She was getting good at ignoring things.

_ **It's been days. You have yet to secure the girl. Your Harbingers are dying. The Slayer and her playtoy disrupted the completion of the ritual sacrifice. Time is running out. Your work will have been for nothing.** _

"I don't care," she whispered. On Saturday morning, she'd had twenty-seven Harbingers left. Every morning since, a few more were gone, shot through with crossbow bolts if they lurked in the general vicinity of the Summers house, or ambushed when they ventured outside the veils of illusion she'd cast about her tiny domain. She couldn't just pull them into her sanctum sanctorum forever; she needed them to fetch food and supplies. How was she going to ride herd on the crazies if she ran out of Harbingers and what did it matter if the world ended in three days?

"You can create more servitors," Jenny whispered in her ear. _**"Doing so requires access to the Seal of Danzathar, which is currently buried thirty feet beneath a bulldozer on the grounds of Sunnydale High."**_ She pursed her lips. _**"And the Hellmouth is currently so unstable that it's possible the ritual would fail in any case."**_

"Well then, I guess we're just screwed, right?"

Her vampire self was sitting on the edge of her cot, sneering. _**"Ooh, yeah, lie there all pouty-faced and oh so guilty, Willow. Let the world die around you--that'll make it all better, won't it?"**_ The familiar face went alien as it thrust close to her own, sprouting fangs and ridges. _**"If you stop now, you're nothing but a murderer, a frightened, power-hungry child so terrified of the dark you burned down your own house to ward it off."**_ The voice--her voice--dropped to a cajoling purr. _**"But if you gather your courage and go on, my nummy treat, the tears of gratitude from a whole planet will wash the bloodstains from your hands."**_

Willow stared at the dark. "I hate you."

Young Buffy giggled. _**"Pronoun trouble, Wills?"**_

*****

It didn't look like much, the Hellmouth, even open, as long as twenty-headed snake demons weren't pouring out of it. At the moment, it wasn't even glowing or giving off hallucinogenic fumes. A twenty-foot crack in the earth, like hundreds of other earthquake faults in California, encircled by a spiderweb of yellow CAUTION! tape and a pair of bulldozers flanking it as jealously as bison protecting a calf. For two, almost three years now, the site of the former Sunnydale High School had been an urban war zone, officially the casualty of a catastrophic gas main explosion following an earthquake. It had been fenced off and ignored for as long as possible by the Board of Education, until the rising grumbles of parents tired of busing their children elsewhere had forced the city into action. In the last few months, the sagging old fence had been replaced by a shiny new one, and trucks and bulldozers had rumbled into action like giant mechanical bumblebees, ferrying their loads of debris away.

Over half the lot was now a bare, tire-raked expanse of earth, barred with the long black shadows of heavy machinery. Bare, but not deserted. Buffy crouched at the lip of the pit, Dawn knelt beside her, and Spike bracketed Dawn on the other side. Half a dozen nylon ropes trailed past them, down over the edge into the depths of the Hellmouth. At some distance from the others, Tara and Anya sat cross-legged on a tatami mat, facing one another, eyes closed, lips moving in a soft, ceaseless river-run of mystic plainsong. The lone white pillar candle on the ground between them did brave if fruitless battle with the impersonal glare of construction floodlights.

"The all quiet on the Willow front," Buffy said, voice hushed. "Any clues yet?"

Giles, standing a few paces behind them with a stopwatch in one hand, stilled a gesture towards his glasses with the other. "Every spot where one of the lights touched down Friday night was a site where a dimensional portal has been opened in the past," he said. "Kingman's Bluff was the site of a major temple to Proserpexa once. One of those tedious sects whose chief sins lie in the execrable prose of their sacred writings, but they did attempt to raise several dangerous entities before the temple was destroyed in an earthquake in the early thirties. The dimensional fold in the cavern where the Master was trapped, the old warehouse..."

"She sealed the doors with blood," Tanner whispered. He was huddled in one of Xander's too-large coats, watching the proceedings with large haunted eyes.

"Yes." Giles's voice sounded worn, scraped thin over inner pain. "The skin-doll you destroyed was very likely made from the remains of the initial sacrifice. Had you not destroyed it, it would have been brought here to the Hellmouth, thrown in to finish the spell."

"It doesn't look so bad." Dawn was whispering too, though there was no reason for it. She leaned forward, her hair falling over her shoulders. "It's just like the climbing wall we did in Phys Ed, right? Except with a jillion-foot hole underneath."

Buffy unfolded her arms from across her knees and laid a hand on her sister's shoulder--half comforting pat, half don't-fall-in death-grip. "If it's one of the walls with melting watches draped over the top, sure. It starts getting seriously Billy Pilgrim down there after awhile. I fell faster than the demon I jumped in after--just because I really needed to, I think. But you'll be staying in one spot, and we can't be sure--"

One of the ropes jerked and went taut, interrupting, and Buffy scooted back from the edge and pulled Dawn with her as a figure, dark but for a single glaring cyclopean eye, emerged hand over hand from the pit. Spike reached down, took hold, and hauled it effortlessly over the edge. Xander staggered to his feet, gasping, and switched off the light on his hard hat. "The world is weebling. Or is that just me?" He sat down on the tread of the nearest bulldozer and Anya jumped to her feet and pulled his helmet off. He leaned into her side--world endage had its points, Buffy guessed; wedding squabbles seemed to be a thing of the past. "My brow thanks you. Not technically fevered, but who am I to turn down a good stroke? How long did I last? I feel like the final stages of a sleep-deprivation lab."

Giles held up the stopwatch. "Twenty-five minutes." Xander leaned back against the Caterpillar and moaned. "And a maximum depth of sixty-five feet, if we're to trust our measurements. Right then. The protection spell does give us another twenty feet of penetration, at minimum." The Watcher glanced at Tara. "Are you certain you can't increase the range?"

Tara snuffed out the candle. "Not unless I go down with her. This close to the Hellmouth we're lucky I can get it to work at all."

"We might need to try sending you both down, then. We've got to make sure Willow gets all the way in." Buffy peered into the abyss. If Spike made another Nietzsche joke, she'd thump him. "As far down as we can get Dawn and not suffocate her or turn her into a newt, anyway."

"Which is why we're using Joe Average as a guinea pig instead of the girl with the super-powered metabolism or the guy who only inhales on special occasions." Xander got up with a groan and gave Anya a more-than-usually fervent squeeze. "I'm gonna need a rest and refuel before we try it again, guys. Pizza break."

"So...there are, like, ledges, right?" Dawn asked as they trooped wearily back to the Magic Box half an hour later, laden with pizza boxes and two dozen Krispy Kreme hots--more like tepids by now, but still fairly high on the food-of-the-gods scale. "I'm not going to be hanging in mid-air?"

Buffy frowned. It had been so long ago, and she hadn't exactly been scouting for scenic outlooks. "I don't remember any ledges, but I was more looking for large icky demons."

"There are two-inch wrinkles you could call ledges." Xander laid the pizza out on the table. "Or you could call them deathtraps waiting to happen. But I think we can do better than that. We're gonna need more rope, and some foundation bolts, two-by-fours, a winch, a cargo net--"

Tara scribbled another item on a list of spell components and handed it to Anya. "We still need a reliable teleport block. And if we can get hold of some tiger's eye--the stone, I mean--"

Spike propped an elbow against the counter in direct defiance of the 'Do not lean on glass' sign and Buffy bent to inspect the pizza choices. Pepperoni and pineapple, sausage and onion, and all-veggie, without... She looked up, meeting Xander's pained dark eyes. "I got it without the bell peppers this time," he said, waving one hand over the array of pies. "Just--I don't know, just in case Willow walks in the door and says 'Really belated April Fools!' and we all laugh."

Buffy grabbed a slice of pepperoni and pineapple and the nearest book in a language she was competent to pretend to read. She opened it at random and stared at the crabbed lines of text. She had no idea what she was looking for, there was never an index anyway, and this was a Willow thing, darn it. Her thing was sneaking looks at the dirty woodcuts and hiding a copy of _Glamour_ in the flyleaf. "It's just wrong, isn't it?" She rubbed her nose, hoping it would relieve the prickling in her eyes. "Research party without Willow? It's like water running uphill or white pumps after Labor Day."

"For all we know, she is here," Anya said, plunking another pile of musty tomes down on the research table between Giles and Tara. "She could be spying on us this very minute."

Tara's lip quivered. "I'd know. If she were w-watching us. She's been...I haven't sensed anything since Friday night." A large fat tear slid off the end of her nose and blotted the parchment in front of her. Spike held out a handkerchief in wordless penitence. Tara took it without looking at him, but her fingers lingered on his for a second longer than necessary. Spike was treating her with the same exaggerated gentleness he'd used when she'd been brainsucked, and Tara seemed to allow his clumsy attempts at kindness as much because it made him feel better as because she required them. She blew her nose and shoved the book into the center of the table. "I think this spell may help. It's for purifying air, but I think we could adapt it to make a kind of Hellmouth survival bubble."

As the others crowded around the book, Buffy corralled Xander. "We'd better get going if we want this set up and tested by tomorrow night." She nibbled on a donut. "Spike and I can truck the heavy stuff. Is your boss going to notice all this stuff walking off the site?"

Xander shook his head. "Not if it tiptoes. Oh, and on a personal note? I'm not only not fired, I may get a battlefield promotion, since Tony hasn't shown up for work since Friday."

Anya beamed at him. "Sometimes it's an advantage working in a town where traumatic neck injuries are so common."

Xander looked askance at Spike. "Uh huh. You do have an alibi for all of that night, right?"

Spike gave him a two-fingered salute. "See if I ever do you any favors."

Buffy abandoned her book to its fate and drifted to the front of the store, peering out through the security shutters across the front windows for sign of Harbingers. Coast clear. She leaned into the doorframe, forehead to the glass, wondering idly what she ought to wear to Sandra's party if the world didn't end. Maybe she could blow just a teensy bit more of the bankbook on something new for herself. After a moment she realized that Xander had scuffed up beside her, hands shoved into his pockets. "She's really planning on doing it, isn't she?" he asked, voice husky. "I didn't believe she'd go through with it. It's _Willow_." His shoulders slumped. "If we could talk to her, just once more..."

"We'll get another chance," Buffy said. "Phasers on stun, right?"

Xander nodded, unhappiness plain on his face. "I always thought that no matter what happened, the four of us would always come out of it together, you know? And then you died. Now Giles is going back to England, and..." His head dropped and he stared down at the worn toes of his work boots.

"It's OK, Xander," she said. Keep it soft, keep it firm. It hurt her badly enough, and he'd known Willow forever and a day longer than she had. "I know you'll always be here."

"That's just the thing, Buff." He sounded miserable. "I won't. I mean, I'll be here. In Sunnydale. If you ever need extra help, or contracting, or pizza, the Xandman is your man. End of the world, holler and I'll come running. But as far as the day-to-day slaying goes--" He took a deep breath. "After the wedding, I'm done. Anya and I have been doing a lot of talking, and...she wants a family, and I can't--if I have kids, I'm gonna be there for them every night. The whole idea scares me shitless, but if I can't face my own monsters, then what the hell have I been doing facing down other people's for the last six years? This promotion at work--I could be making real money if I put my back into it. Enough that we could seriously think about the white picket fence thing. And--God, say something, Buffy, please tell me you're not mad!"

He looked so bereft standing there, all awful shaggy haircut and worried brown eyes. Not the geeky kid she'd run into on the high school steps any longer; her Xander-shaped friend had gotten taller and broader and God, Xander was a grown-up. Tears welled up in her eyes, and Buffy laughed. "Xander--you love what you do, don't you? The building stuff?"

He blinked. "Well... yeah. It's--I'm good at it. Really good. And it's maybe just ordinary work, but I'm... The world's ending, and I'm thinking about next year."

"The world's always ending. If we don't live like it isn't, we'll never live at all." She pulled him into an impulsive hug, and Xander hugged back, hard enough that she almost felt it. "You've found your life, Xander. How could I be mad about that? That's why I do this end-of-the-world stuff to begin with, so people can have lives. And you're one of my favorite people." Buffy drew away, smiling up at him. "And kids--not a problem. You'll be a great dad."

He snorted. "Yeah, my family photo album is itemized list of everything not to do." He glanced back towards the research table, where Spike was arguing with Giles over a translation. "Does it ever...I mean, kids. The concept. Do you ever see yourself as a mom? Because me as a dad, every time I get close the brain shorts out."

Buffy shrugged, lacing her arms beneath her breasts. "That was Angel's big deal, not mine. My fantasies only made it as far as the big orange-blossom and Vera Wang wedding. Two AM feedings and diaper changes, not high on the romance meter. Kids might be something to think about if I live long enough to retire..." Sudden, stunning thought: that might really happen, with three Slayers running around. Her expression went mischievous. "Of course we'd have to adopt. Or see if the sperm bank has any short blue-eyed donors with curly brown hair and killer cheekbones." Xander was gaping at her, and Buffy giggled. "Oh, come on, Xander! This is the twenty-first century. If Spike's tadpoles don't make the swim team it's not the end of the world. And speaking of which..."

Back at the research table, Buffy slipped an arm around Spike's waist. He enveloped her in one leather-clad arm, nuzzling the top of her head with that low purring rasp of a growl. Across the table Xander was doing the same to Anya, minus the growling. Giles was pointing out a relevant passage of the spell as Tara and Dawn looked on, absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge and pizza. "I love you all," Buffy said, softly enough that even Spike cocked his head as if he weren't sure he'd heard right. She swallowed. "I--I just wanted to say that once. Without, you know, death threats attached."

Dawn clipped her shoulder lightly and smiled. "Hey. Wouldn't be you without death threats."

*****

The black-robed man knelt and held out the tiny, precious object in both cupped hands. "As you instructed, Exalted Vessel."

Willow suppressed her squick and plucked the wad of Juicyfruit from his palm, holding the gum between thumb and forefinger in a manner calculated to minimize surface contact. It was still gooey, crusted with dirt and, with any luck, spit. Gross, but necessary. Tara and Anya had come up with a counterspell to her more generic locator spell days ago. She'd picked strands of Tara's hair off her own sweater, spirited wadded-up Kleenex from Dawn's backpack, and dispatched one of the crazies to Spike's crypt to bring back scraps of cloth stained with things even grosser than used gum. "Are you sure it's Xander's?" she asked. "Because if I end up tracking one of his beer-bellied construction buddies across half of Sunnydale again--"

The hooded head jerked down between dusty black shoulders, hoping to avoid decapitation by the edge in her voice. "I observed him discard it myself, Exalted Vessel."

"Fine. Dismissed." Willow watched it slink off to join its remaining brethren around the reassembled altar. She took the gum over to a small brazier set up before a large map of Sunnydale. The sullen vermillion light painted her face with blood--out, damned spot. Willow crouched before the brazier, took up a handful of incense and sprinkled the tiny beads of resin over the coals. Each grain melted with a hiss and a crackle; fat green sparks flew up around her and the air filled with a pungent, nose-prickling scent.

Even magic brought no pleasure now. She hadn't slept more than four hours at a stretch in days, and sometimes she could almost believe that there was nothing more to the universe than the endless tangle of caverns and tunnels--_Many fall down to the Underworld, but few return to the sunlit lands._ What she wouldn't give for the scent of burning Marshwiggle. Willow brushed the last of the sticky residue off her fingers and held out one hand, palm flat, and dropped the wad of chewing gum onto the coals. "Alexander Lavelle Harris, protraho."

The magic might fail to delight, but at least it didn't fail. On the map of Sunnydale pasted to the cavern wall, a glowing mote labeled 'Xander' appeared, moving slowly along Main and joining the half-dozen other dots milling about the town: Buffy, Dawn, Spike, Tara--her very own Marauder's Map. She still hadn't been able to get anything from Anya or Giles; anyone who'd worked with magic as long as they had grew suitably paranoid about destroying items which might be used against them.

Willow sat back on her heels and watched the tiny golden lights. Xander was at work. Tara was on the UCS campus, not all that far away. Buffy and Spike were..._crap, not again._ She jumped to her feet, shoved the nearest Harbingers out of her way, and raced over to the irregular row of scrying bowls set up along the nearest cavern wall. Poured-concrete birdbaths, a big step up from pie plates. In each shallow bowl the silvery surface of the water revealed a different set of murky images. Willow passed a hand over the nearest one and the picture flared to life. Buffy and Spike, squared off against four or five Harbingers. They must have broken through the tunnel roof inside her protective ring of illusions.

She clapped her hands together with a shouted word that left her throat raw, and the world disintegrated around her. A queasy moment later reality snapped back into focus and Willow was standing in the middle of the tunnel, twenty feet or so behind the line of Harbingers. A pile of fresh rubble from the new hole in the ceiling half-choked the passageway opposite, and Spike and Buffy stood side by side, taking advantage of their newly-created higher ground halfway up the treacherous slope. They'd brought weapons this time, short swords suited to close fighting in an enclosed space, and one Harbinger was already lying spreadeagled at the foot of the little hill, the slowly widening pool of its blood darkening the earth below.

_"Thicken!"_ Willow cried, thrusting both hands out, fingers crooked to rake power from the air around her and send it lancing towards her targets--she'd trap the Harbingers too, but that couldn't be avoided. The air grew glassy and opaque for a second, but refused to solidify, resisting her command. Someone had a counter-spell going. She reached out of herself, feeling for telltale traces of power--there; gauzy veils of pale green and violet clouded the aether around the interlopers, sending her spells awry. Tara and Anya, working in concert. A counter-spell that powerful had to be chanted continuously to work, so if either of them lost their concentration... She knew where Tara was; if she sent a Harbinger to distract her, maybe even bring her here--

Buffy's cell phone rang, loud and brash against the muffled grunts of the fight, and she fell back a step, pulling her cell from within her jacket while Spike surged forward in a flurry of short vicious slashes and jabs. "Kind of busy here, G--what? You're sure? Oh, God. We'll be right there." She stuffed the phone back in her pocket and dove back down the hill of debris, stones rolling beneath her boots. "Dawn's missing," she gasped, grabbing Spike's arm. "This can wait." Her furious green eyes met Willow's. "I'm trying really hard to remember we're friends, Will. If she's hurt, expect an attack of early-onset Alzheimer's."

"What?" Willow yelped, stung by the left-field accusation. The darkness drained from her eyes. "I haven't--" But Buffy was already clambering back up the pile of earth and stone, Spike at her back. One after the other they leaped upwards and were gone, Buffy sending one last angry, disdainful look over her shoulder.

Willow stood there in confusion for a moment, as the remaining Harbingers cringed against the wall, waiting for orders. What was going on? With a muttered incantation she teleported back in the main cavern and strode over to the locator map. Buffy's, Spike's, and Tara's lights were all closely grouped now, and heading across town with a speed that indicated that they must be in a car--probably Spike's, since it was still an hour or so shy of sunset. Xander's light had left the job site and was heading in the same general direction the others were taking.

Anya was probably still with Tara, and Giles might be with them, with Xander, or on his own. But all of them were converging on one spot. Dawn's sigil glowed all by itself, in the middle of the city block Willow knew better than almost any other. The old high school. The Hellmouth. Why would Dawn go there? Dawn was perfectly capable of haring off on some wild-eyed scheme, but why now? Was there some third party in play here, one of the wandering godlets, maybe? Or had the First decided to take matters into its own immaterial hands, luring Dawn away with visions of her mother or something? Or was this some big fake-out on Buffy's part to get her out in the open? Buffy was like an overprotective lioness where Dawn was concerned; how likely was it that she'd willingly allow her sister to mess around in the gateway to a hell dimension?

There was no way to tell without more information, and no way to get information without going after it. Willow turned to the nearest Harbinger. "Any of the crazies that aren't too many french fries short of a Happy Meal, get them together, and bring them here. You'll be coming too, except for whoever needs to stay behind and do the altar-chanty stuff." She snapped a finger. "Come on, Skippy, move it. We've got work to do."

She could feel the stirring, power arising and spreading its wings within her. _**There's little time left,**_ the darkness said, no longer speaking in the voices of her dead, but in its own--old and deep and terrible, like the inexorable shifting of stone, like the petrified fang of some antediluvian terror piercing her heart. **_Willow Rosenberg, are you strong enough to do what must be done?_**

Willow tipped her head back, closing her eyes, parting her lips, spreading her arms wide. Every light in the cavern snuffed out simultaneously, and the darkness rolled in--an endless inky midnight which had inhabited the fastness of the Earth since the dawn of time, the cold depths of interstellar space chilling the molten heart of a young world. The darkness rolled in--into the cave, into her eyes, into her heart. Willow's eyes opened, and her gaze was a night without stars. "I will be."

*****

"Ready?" Buffy asked.

Xander nodded, checking the safety before slinging the gun over one shoulder. "As I'll ever be." He craned his head back, eyes tracing a path up through the insane jungle gym of twisted girders. Two-thirds of the way up two or three massive steel beams intersected. Yeah, he could do that. Leap from wall to shattered wall like Spiderman on acid. He felt curiously light. Springloaded.

Buffy's hand lingered on his arm. Spike pulled the box of ammunition out of his duster pocket and handed it over. "S'pose I should wish you luck, but I don't want the fact I haven't got round to eating you yet get you thinking we're mates or anything."

"Yeah, I hate you too." Xander tucked the box in his pocket. The contents rattled against the case. Death-rattle. What the hell was a death-rattle? Something you gave baby ghouls?

Anya looked up at him with tear-stained cheeks and said, "You're coming back down from there alive, Alexander Harris, because we're getting married in twelve days and I refuse to let our future children be orphans. Also, I love you. I had to wait a thousand years to find you, and I can't wait another thousand, so--so don't die."

It was an order, not a request. Not one he had any qualms about following, either. So he held Anya tight, and Tara patted his hand, and Giles cleaned his glasses, and then he was climbing. He couldn't die, and that was that. Xander hauled himself up on a rusty hunk of rebar, the heavy length of metal and high-impact plastic at his back thumping against his spine as he climbed. The charred remnants of Sunnydale High loomed up around him, a twisted mass of steel beams and shattered hunks of brick and concrete.

Xander stretched full-length along the slanting rain-streaked surface of a fallen wall--part of the gym, maybe. From his vantage point he could see almost the whole city block. Except for the bulldozers guarding the Hellmouth, the heavy earthmoving machinery was mostly off at the other end of the lot, but half a dozen trucks were parked along the fence, next to the ranks of Porta-Johns, waiting for sunrise and their next loads of debris. Down below on the cleared portion of the lot was a chaotic mosaic of tire-track whorls, each separate treadmark casting its own crisp black shadow in the lunar glare of the floodlights. One small step for a man, one hell of a fall for Xander Harris.

There was movement along the fringes of the rubble pile; Tanner, Giles and Anya had taken up stations of their own, each of them setting up the crystals and candles and stinky herbs as necessary. Teleport block. On the bare earth next to the Hellmouth, Tara knelt and bowed her head--not serene, but composed, the hidden steel in her soft face very near the surface. Buffy and Spike were helping Dawn on to the winch platform; Dawn had a small metal box clutched in both hands. Her pale, set face disappeared as the line on the winch uncoiled, lowering her into the depths. Spike kicked the winch's locking mechanism closed, and he and Buffy disappeared into the shadows.

Xander felt terribly alone. No protection spells for him, nothing that might draw Willow's attention. _Buffy's big solemn eyes looking up at him. "You're the best shot of all of us. And we can't afford a second one. It's got to be you."_ Army guy training and a white-trash childhood spent potting pigeons with BBs, and now he was taking a bead on his best friend. He pulled the ammunition case out of his coat pocket and opened it, examining the rounds inside--one was as good as the next, he supposed, but it was always so important to Willow that she pick out the exact right notebook, the exact right pencil... He chose the nearest one, unlimbered the gun, fitted the round into the chamber, and eased the barrel through a notch in the cement, sighting through the crosshairs--_It's Colonel Harris, with a rifle, in the Book Depository!_

She was right. It had to be him. Just as it had to be Buffy when it was Angel that needed taking down. He wouldn't want it to be anyone else.

*****

Willow gathered power in both hands as she walked, drawing in ribbons and scraps of old spells from the air and weaving them together. Willow hoarded power from the borrowed store the First had granted her, letting it boil and seethe in her belly. Willow leached power from the bones of the earth with each step, drawing it upwards to coil and flower in her heart.

Willow took power, tamed it, shaped it, and unleashed it. "Open sesame!"

The gates facing the street blew off their hinges, flying across the bare ground in a white-hot searing fountain of molten aluminum. Willow prowled through the gap, all sass and slink, eyes gleaming obsidian, her auburn head crowned with silver flame. No more fear. No more doubt. Those things were luxuries she didn't have time for any longer. A phalanx of robed Harbingers flanked her on either side, and in their wake the sorrowful remainder of Tanner's people shuffled along. The crazies clung to one another, their whimpers and moans lost on the rising wind.

She could feel the opposition to her presence. The chanting grew louder as she approached the Hellmouth, a complex interplay of voices, Anya and Giles and a less-familiar baritone. Tara's beloved voice rose above them, solitary and pure as a nightingale above the chirping of sparrows, and the tears burned Willow's cheeks as they fell.

Dawn was out there, a wellspring of verdant power, a siren call to anyone with ears to hear it--out of sight, but far from out of mind. So were the others, but she'd deal with them later. Getting Dawn to the altar of the First and doing what she needed to do was paramount. Teleporting more than one person was tricky, but far from impossible. Willow reached out and grasped cords of magic, scarlet and silver, violet and gold. "Inanitas per subvectant!" she cried, her voice grown larger than the rest of her. Power surged out to make her will manifest, ribbons and ropes and cables to bind time and space to her will.

The tripartite chant of her enemies (enemies now?) rose higher, each word a knife cutting a strand in the net of her power. The aether rebounded, resisting her efforts, and her spell twisted, unraveled, and ebbed away. Willow fell back, her thin chest heaving, lips peeled back over white teeth. Her hair fell in wild elflocks about her face. "OK, that's pretty impressive, guys, but I don't have time to piddle around." She turned and waved the nearest handful of Harbingers forward. "The girl we want is in the Hellmouth. Get her."

On the fringes of the barren lot, in the interstices of the chain-link and the cornices of shattered walls, translucent figures were gathering, corner-of-the-eye shimmerings, walking heat-mirages in the dead of winter. A dragon floated by overhead, its voice the clangor of a thousand brazen gongs. A massive red-bearded man with a hammer, a cat-headed woman in a sheer cotton sheath, a giant coal-black raven. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, blurring in and out. A naked youth with dark curling hair and cloven hooves sat on the edge of the concrete slab, grinning at her. It toyed with a set of reed pipes and said something in a language she didn't understand. Great, she was being haunted by Zamfir. Willow sent a blast of violet lightning its way, pulverizing the concrete. The apparition laughed and faded away.

The Harbingers spread out across the expanse of naked earth, tearing down the sawhorses with their spiderwebbing of yellow plastic ribbon. They converged upon the Hellmouth and fanned away again in confusion, ants who'd lost their scent trail. Willow looked more closely and caught a familiar spell-trace--Dawn must be holding the cookie tin with the talisman for the spellcloak in it.

There were always loopholes. Tara sat oblivious on the edge of the Abyss, spinning the skein of words which kept Dawn safe in the mouth of Hell. Straw into gold, just like the fairy tale. Willow gestured, and the Harbingers turned on Tara.

Buffy catapulted over a crumpled bank of gym lockers, a sword almost as long as she was tall raised high over her head. Her blade flashed in deadly quicksilver arcs to the right and left, and the hands of the Harbingers nearest Tara fell twitching to earth, the severed veins splattering chaotic arabesques of crimson across the dirt. Spike's inhuman roar drowned out the chant for a second as he followed her, suspended in mid-air for endless seconds on black leather wings--_wow, vampires got hang time._ The descending head of his battle-axe ripped into the black-robed figures, toppling Bringers like saplings. The two of them fought like a single creature, striking, feinting, hazel eyes and gold blazing alike as they painted a portrait in carnage among the Bringers. Crouching Slayer, Hidden Vampire. You never really understood Buffy yammering on about being a force of nature until that force was unleashed against you, backed up by Death incarnate in black leather and peroxide.

But Willow Rosenberg was a force too, above and beyond nature or death. "Sica flammae, aboleunt!" Willow shouted. The incantation left a trail of violet fire in the air behind it, each word an incandescent dagger. Buffy dodged, barely, and the spell-blade creased her cheek, leaving a livid scorched streak. Spike whirled just in time to trade a fist-sized hole in his shoulder for a fist-sized hole in his duster. Willow didn't wait on the results of her spellcasting; she was already waving the crazies forwards. "Get the girl while the Bringers distract them! Hurry!"

Spike had lost his axe, the blade half-sunk in a concrete block and no time to pry it free. Buffy flung him the sword and went Michelle Yeoh on the nearest crazy--wading in with kicks and punches instead of tempered steel, but she wasn't pulling those punches, either. Spike caught the blade one-handed and drove it into the belly of an oncoming crazy--Jim? Ronnie? Ramon?--lifting the man half off the ground as he ripped the blade free in a fountain of blood. Willow'd seen Buffy kill people before. Human people. Gwendolyn Post. Half a dozen Knights of Byzantium. Maybe even a few crazies during the assault on Glory's tower. But there was still a tiny horrified shock in seeing Spike make his first human kill in three years, and seeing Buffy ignore it completely.

Two of the crazies had reached the winch, and together they wrenched the crank free and started hauling Dawn up. Willow heard a shriek as the winch platform jerked and thumped against the inner wall of the Hellmouth. Buffy hauled the men off, sending them flying head-first into a pile of bricks, while Spike snapped a Harbinger's spine across a fallen pillar. Vampire and Slayer stood back to back around Tara and the abandoned winch.

She had to break through the counterspell. Willow reached out for more power and a corona of silver and scarlet flared up around her. The world faded away and everything was stripped to its essence: the ragged pulsing wound of the Hellmouth, the raw unmolded power of the Key, the intertwined flames of the Slayer and her consort. Lesser flames burned closer to hand, feeble things she could snuff out at will. One of the fallen crazies went up in a pillar of colorless fire, screaming as his soul was stripped from his body, and both were dissolved into the raw stuff of magic. Willow spoke a Word that left her throat raw and bleeding and reached out. The air around Giles went sulfurous and cloudy; he collapsed, choking, his glasses shattering on the rubble.

Another crazy dissolved, another Word, and Anya staggered to her feet, wailing in terror, her eyes glued to some invisible terror. A third, and Daniel Tanner was struck dumb. Only Tara was left.

"Volo me!" Willow was hovering in mid-air now, halfway over the Hellmouth. She outshone the stars overhead; actinic light radiated all around her, painting jet-black shadows in every direction. The Medusa's nest of her hair crackled and writhed in the inferno of her power and her eyes were the void itself. Buffy stood on the winch platform below her, tiny and indomitable, Spike at her side and her sword in her hands once more. Foolish little Slayer. In the lambent gold of her aura were the lingering traces of the Raising spell, tiny threads of indigo raveling and falling away as they were no longer needed. Willow reached out with infinite delicacy and precision, to pluck the last of the threads away.

_Click._

There was the Slayer, that force of nature, sword dropping from limp hands to clatter on the dead earth below. Falling to her knees, gasping for breath...

...remembering heaven.

Willow laughed, high and wild and triumphant, and began her descent.

*****

Xander remembered Willow when she was only the smart shy kid, the one too honest to let him copy her math homework, but who spent hours explaining binomials in words of one syllable till he could scrape by with a gentleman's C. He remembered Buffy when she was carefree and curvy and one vampire was a serious fight. They'd both traveled so far beyond the realm of Xander Harris, Ordinary Guy, it wasn't funny. And there was Spike, the Slayer of Slayers, and Tara, who was no slouch at the magic biz, and Giles the walking encyclopedia of the supernatural, and Anya the ex-demon...

Right now, Xander Harris, Ordinary Guy, was the most important person in the world.

On the field below, Buffy collapsed to her knees, and Spike, torn between her and Dawn, was distracted for the moment it took for Willow to lash out with a scourge of ebony lightning and swat him aside like a bug. Then she was soaring down towards the Hellmouth, glowing like Jean Grey about to torch the planet of the asparagus people. Xander swallowed fear and love together in one sickening lump, cocked, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.

The dart Willow'd enchanted herself, the dart powerful enough to take down a Krallock demon with a touch, flew straight and sure to embed itself in her thigh. For a heartbeat Willow froze, her eyes wide and shocked, and then she wavered, spinning, searching the darkness for him. Her lips moved--_You too, Xander?_

He couldn't see the magic, but he could see what it did. An invisible tsunami raged across the vacant lot, flinging the bulldozers aside like Tonka toys. Beneath him the snap and scream of displaced metal and stone drowned all other sound. The vast jackstraw pile of broken walls and twisted spires of rebar shifted and shuddered overhead, and the last thing Xander thought before the sky fell was, _But I **promised...**_


	36. Chapter 36

Curled pillbug-tight on the unyielding ground, Buffy buried her face in her knees and sobbed. The numb grey void in her soul was void no longer, overflowing now with a memory of transcendence no living mind was meant to bear. Peace. Light. Warmth. Love. The promise of that moment just before the jump fulfilled: her whole life laid out like a tapestry before her, and for the first time every freaky thing in it made sense. She'd seen, and understood, and been at rest, in a place that was no place, for a time that was all time.

She yearned after vanished bliss like an addict after the needle. Pain flowed through her in its stead, every nerve and vein a tributary. You woke up to pain, drank it down, breathed it in, wrapped yourself up in it, fell asleep and dreamed of it. The pain of uncertainty, the pain of fear, the pain of love. The pain of humanity, helpless against the encroaching night. The pain of a single child with a skinned knee. The pain of knowing your war was endless no matter how many battles you won. The pain of fathers who left, lovers who betrayed, mothers who died, sisters who depended on you, friends who tore you out of heaven. The floodwaters would never recede until...

**_ "Buffy, honey."_** Her mother was kneeling by her side, her voice rain on parched earth, soothing and cool. _**"It's hard, I know. But it's almost over. You've won, sweetie. You stopped Willow and saved Dawn. You can rest now. It's time for you to come home."**_

"Mom?" Buffy lifted her face, masked with tears and dust, to her mother's shimmering form, floating now above the Hellmouth just as Willow had. The brand scored across her cheek by Willow's spell-dagger throbbed angrily with every movement. Somewhere far away, someone else was touching her, calling for her, crying for her--a crow-harsh voice sounding in her ears, a hard hand striking her good cheek. Buffy crawled to her knees and twisted away, her outstretched hands straining after her mother's immaterial caress, always a hair's-breadth out of her reach.

"**_ All you have to do is follow me, Buffy."_** Joyce was smiling at her, her arms spread invitingly. So close, so real. _**"I'm here to take you back where you belong. Just a few steps and we'll be together again forever."**_

Buffy took one staggering step towards her mother, then another. Something was holding her back, but she was the Slayer, she was strong. _The Slayer forges strength out of pain._ Swaying on the edge of infinity, she looked down. The Hellmouth yawned at her feet, a bottomless, inky deep. Far, far, below, a glow illumined the murk, a pure, lucent radiance that made her breath rasp in her dust-dry throat. Tears welled up, pricking in the corners of her eyes and forging a trail of salty agony down her burnt cheek. She knew that light.

Joyce beckoned, her eyes shining with love. _**"That's it, honey. Just one more step and it'll all be over."**_

One step. Easy. That other voice was still yammering on in the distance. _Buffy, come back to me, love, you've got to come back, we can't send Will to tiptoe through your skull this time round, pet, my Buffy, my sweet Slayer, Dawnie's down a bloody well and you can't leave little sis, now, can you? God, Buffy, don't leave me again, don't you fucking leave me, please, love, oh, please..._

She turned the words over in her mind, examining each as if it were a stone she'd picked up on a beach in an idle moment--keep it, or throw it away? Whoever had spoken them was in pain, too; it reverberated through every syllable.

** _ "One more step, and it won't hurt any more."_ **

She was the Slayer. No matter how much it hurt, the Slayer always got back up and flung herself back into the battle. Once more into the breach. Whatever a breach was. Because, because...why? Because it was the right thing to do? Why was that? There had to be another reason, didn't there? Joyce Summers beckoned again; she could smell the roses her mother had used to fuss over, and the richness of fresh-turned earth...and there was something wrong there, because it wasn't exactly that smell, and wasn't even quite right for the smell it was...

Scent was the most primal of senses, rooted deep in the animal recesses of brain. Where anxious faces and pleading words couldn't penetrate, charred flesh and the bitter earthy musk of terrified vampire set her internal alarms jangling. Buffy gulped down cold December midnight and Spike-scent, and opened her eyes to a landscape of crumpled black leather. Her nose was mashed into Spike's shoulder, and she could feel his whole body trembling against her, every muscle iron-hard with strain. The skin of her unburnt cheek still tingled where he'd struck her, trying to snap her out of it. She could feel the print of each individual finger. They were half a step away from oblivion, and the ground for several yards behind them was a drunken trail of cross-hatched heel-gouges, the marks of Spike's struggle to drag her back from the Hellmouth's edge. "Spike?"

"Love!" Spike's lean face lit up around a smile, and his voice broke with relief, snapped right in two. His crushing embrace nearly snapped her in two along with it. His hands molded the shape of her face from the darkness, his lips pressing out the details of cheek and brow, branding the particulars of his being into her skin. Making her over. "Buffy, sweeting--"

"Spike, it's--I'm awake." Couldn't say all right, not yet, but--awake. "I remembered. Where I was."

His breath halted for a second, then resumed in a long slow hiss of comprehension. "It was...a good place, then?"

"Yeah." The word was half a sob. Spike said nothing, and if he had no words at a time like this, there weren't any to be had.

**_ "Buffy."_** Her mother's voice had grown sharper, more urgent. _**"If you don't come with me now, it will be too late."**_

She scrunched her eyes shut, wrapped her arms around Spike's waist and held on, as hard as he'd held on to her. His arms were an opiate against memory: forget the Valium, Spike was vampire methadone. Not because his embrace was a greater bliss than what she'd left behind (It comes close, an irreverent part of her opined) but because this was what he lived with, every second of every day: a gnawing, cell-deep craving for something right under his nose, something he had only to reach out and _take_.

If Spike could do it, she damned well could too.

Buffy looked up at the thing that wasn't her mother, and the lost little girl within her wailed in bereavement. But she wasn't that little girl any longer. "Even if you were real--" Fifty-one days lay between her and the siren allure of death, each one fragile as a cobweb. Buffy set them up one after the other in her mind, layer upon layer of living. The day she'd bought makeup. The day they'd unpacked the Christmas ornaments. The day she'd killed the Krallock demon. One false move would tip them all over like dominos. "--I couldn't follow you."

Joyce sighed and shook her head, the very picture of exasperated parental amusement. _** "Ah well, it was a long shot."**_

Buffy's grip on Spike slackened as the image fizzled out, and ashy scraps of cloth flaked away beneath her hands as they drew apart. Scorch-marks raked their raw-edged talons across most of his chest, at their deepest revealing the dull pale gleam of bone where muscle and skin had been seared away. Spike caught her look and poked a finger into the hole in his chest with a slightly hysterical giggle. "Lightning bolts. Didn't last long enough to catch me on fire. Will forgets I'm bleedin' demised. I wouldn't 'voom' if she put forty million volts through me."

She could see Spike's ribs. Literally. Never a good sign. Would his lungs look like those emphysema scare-posters from health class, or would vampire healing keep them clean and pink and tar-free? Buffy grabbed his hand and pulled it away from the wound, swallowing hard as her stomach made every effort to perfect its triple backflip, crawl up her throat and run away to join the circus. He'd heal. He had to. "Is Dawn all right?"

"Dunno yet. Will made a bloody mess before she went down." Spike waved an arm, wincing as the motion pulled on damaged muscle; they were standing in the middle of a vast shallow crater, centered on the Hellmouth and rimmed Tunguska-style with debris and toppled machinery. The glare of the remaining floodlights revealed dozens of limp, skew-limbed bodies. Harbingers and crazies littered the ground, dead or unconscious, the abandoned dolls of some bored deity. Tara was slumped against the winch. Filigrees of wheaten hair draped across the handle and braided rivulets of her dark blood trickled from her mouth and nose. Her chest rose and fell in tiny unsteady hitches.

Buffy dropped to her haunches beside the Hellmouth and peered over the edge. "Dawn?"

The bubble of light in the depths was expanding, oozing upwards like the globs in a mystic lava lamp. Fifty feet below, the annular scaffolding Xander had bolted to the inner wall of the Hellmouth was clearly visible. If she had fallen for the First's lure, even odds she'd have hit the scaffolding, broken a few bones and hung there, helpless as a side of beef, rather than falling to a more-or-less clean death. Goody, fuel for future nightmares. Dawn's upturned face was a pale smudge on the wooden landing just below the winch. Willow's fetal silhouette punched an irregular hole in the background of luminous haze, cocooned in the meshes of the cargo net they'd fastened across the width of the shaft below the scaffolding.

Buffy's shoulder prickled with anticipation, and a second later Spike's hand came to rest on it, his thumb massaging the line between blade-bone and spine. Reassurance for both of them. Buffy swiped a lank and dusty lock of hair from her eyes, tucking it back into her ponytail. "We need to get down there. Can you tell if Dawn's still hooked to the winch cable?"

Spike dropped to one knee beside her, leaned over and squinted down into the shaft, blinking as if the brilliance suffusing its depths pained his eyes. "Looks like she's clear of it," he said at last. "Good to go." He scooted over to the winch, took Tara by the shoulders and shifted her to one side, careful to lay her down gently upon the torn earth. She moaned, her fingers clenching on a handful of dirt, but she didn't come to.

Buffy checked her watch. Eleven-thirty-five, and according to the reams of graphs and equations Tanner had produced, the Hellmouth was due to reverse itself at three minutes after midnight. She looked over her shoulder at the wrecked, desolate lot. Her sword was lying in the dirt several yards away. No one else in sight was conscious. Except for a lone figure trudging towards them across the spell-ravaged earth. A naggingly familiar lone figure. Too short to be Xander or Giles or Tanner, too male to be Anya. One of the crazies? Cheap suit, battered fedora, loud shirt...

Spike rose and shaded his eyes with one bloodied hand. "Who the hell...?

"His name's Whistler. Balance demon and general pain in the ass." Buffy got slowly to her feet and moved to stand beside him, shoulder brushing shoulder--a bracing little shock crackled between them, evidence of the slowly building forces around them. Or maybe not; no Wint-O-Green Livesaver sparks when Spike touched Tara. "He showed up the last time. When I had to send Angel to hell."

"Am I feeling the love, or what?" Whistler looked the two of them over with the dissatisfied air of a man who'd been expecting someone taller. "Summers, what is it with you and vampires?"

In two economical strides Buffy was abreast of her fallen sword. She snatched it up, swiped the congealed gore from the edge on the hem of the nearest Harbinger's robe, and sighted down the blade at Whistler. "Let me guess," she said. "You've got something incredibly important to tell me, but somehow none of it will be even slightly useful. I've got hard choices to make, we're all alone in the end, blah blah use the Force, Luke." She flourished the sword overhead and made an experimental slash, the point of the blade whickering by an inch below Whistler's nose. "What say we skip all that and go straight to the part where you scamper off on your little Bobby Orr legs and let me get on with the world-saving?"

The First's illusory form popped back into existence, perching on the winch arm and grinning with Angelus's face. _**"You're making the big assumption that it's world-saving he wants you to get to. Our scruffy little pal here serves the Balance. Have you ever thought about what that means?"**_

Whistler gave it a look. "The leather pants? So very you." He turned back to Buffy. "Tall, dark, and gruesome's right, though. You got this big plan to save your pal. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Miss Cleo I'm not. But either way, the Balance is still fucked, and the forces of goodness and light are gonna come boiling up outta the Hellmouth like roaches up a drainpipe, ready to dish all the naughty boys and girls a spanking."

Buffy tossed her rapidly-disintegrating ponytail over her shoulder, braced the tip of her sword against the right toe of her third-favorite boots and leaned on the hilt. "Let's make one thing perfectly clear. Considering all the help and support the Powers have given me over the years, I'm thinking I owe them something in the neighborhood of squat." Her eyes went flinty. "I'm the Slayer, not the Balancer. My job is to slay demons before they can munch on humans. I don't care what side it's on, anything that comes out of the Hellmouth with a license to kill is going to have to go through me--"

"Through us," Spike corrected, over the firecracker snap of vertebrae as he rolled his head on his shoulders, loosening up.

"Through _us_ first. If we die, we die." The thought of a legitimate return to that glorious realm of light and warmth was almost enough to unlock the shackles of fear and anticipation around her chest. "But not until Willow's free."

The little demon sighed, produced a grimy handkerchief from his breast pocket, and dabbed at a mustard stain on his too-wide lapel. "Touching. Also stupid. Stop this wave, and another'll be right behind it, as long as the Balance is out of whack--"

"So we fall on our swords before midnight and everything's blood and roses, is it?" Spike drawled. "Capulets and Montagues chatting each other up over our cold and dusty bodies?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Whistler said.

Buffy's eyes narrowed. "That leaves the First in control of Willow's body. Willow's my friend, but besides that, leaving Ultimate Evil in control of the most powerful witch in Southern California? Look in the dictionary under 'strategic blunder.'"

Angelus laughed. _**"So kill her first."**_

Spike tucked his thumbs in his belt with a snort. "Black sheep here, not a sacrificial lamb. Buggered if I'll roll over and slit my own throat, or Red's, without being bloody well positive I'm taking you with me. And Buffy's died twice for you prats already. I'd call that enough."

Whistler shrugged and spread both hands in a gesture of amiable indifference. "Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just sayin'. It's not like you two are looking at a long-term relationship anyway. Come on--Slayer? Vampire? Do the math."

Buffy glanced at her watch, then at Spike; if the vampire clenched his jaw any harder, his molars were going to disintegrate. "Math was never my subject. Spike's changed. I've changed."

Angelus chortled, his dark eyes glittering with amusement. _**"Has he? You killed a man today, Spike. You drove a sword into his belly and pulled it out through his ribcage. You watched his blood run red along the blade, and dragged his guts out spill into the dirt all pink and pretty and glistening. You saw the life flicker and go out in his eyes. You inhaled the scent of his terror. And you felt... what? Satisfaction in a good deed well done? I'm curious."**_

Gold wrestled with azure for dominance in Spikes' eyes, and his lips curled ever so slightly back from his gleaming teeth. "Doesn't fucking matter what I feel, it's what I do."

Angelus's massive frame dwindled and Darla sauntered towards them in a swish of plaid and knee socks, hands clasped schoolgirl-fashion behind her back. _**"What we feel--or don't feel--informs what we do. How often have you come close to killing someone in the last week, sweet William? It's only a matter of time, and you know it."**_ Angelus again, in game face. _** "Sooner or later you'll sink those pearly whites into a nice warm juicy neck. And when that happens--when, Spike, not if--she's gonna have to take you down. Assuming it's not her neck to begin with."**_

"You're really grasping at straws, aren't you?" Buffy asked, scornful.

Spike's volcanic growl relaxed into a sneer. "Buffy? You'll have to do better than that, you git. Never happen."

"Grow up, both of you," Whistler countered. He produced a mirror from an inner breast pocket and held it up--a cheap thing backed in pink plastic, like the ones Tara had used for her glamor spell. "There are a million million dimensions--wanna take a guess at how many of them feature the two of you living happily ever after? Take a gander." He shoved the trinket at Spike's face; startled, the vampire flinched back a half-step.

Buffy blinked; there was no reflection in the mirror, of course, but there was--

_ She came back a shambling thing which he couldn't bear to dispose of while any spark of Buffy remained. He kept her in the basement of the crypt, brought her dresses and jewels to hide her slowly decaying flesh, until Giles found them, staked him and sent her rotting shell back to the arms of death._

She came back broken in less obvious ways, and the realization that she wanted him only made her hate herself the more. She poured out all her confusion and self-loathing on his head, until she broke him too, and they cut one another to ribbons on the shards of their pain. On the day the chip stopped working, they found him weeping over her eviscerated body, cradling her still-warm heart in his hands.

She used him as muscle for years, trading on his love for her and for Dawn, taking whatever he had to give and doling out the minimum consideration necessary to keep him in line. He went to dust with her name on his lips. She took the Scoobs out for ice cream afterwards, because they'd saved the world again.

They lived together for six months until someone made him an offer he didn't see reason to refuse. Buffy stumbled on the hatching Suvolte eggs unawares, and he spent the last hours before daylight took him in a drunken stupor, trying desperately to blot out the horror and betrayal in her dead eyes.

They lived together for three wonderful years until she found him with his fangs buried in a mugger's neck. He tried to explain why criminals deserved to be eaten. She ran a stake through his heart and was dead within the week at the hands of a fledgling.

They lived together for eight years, until...

World after world, variation upon variation. It took weeks, or months, or years. It happened in alleys, in bars, in the illusory safety of their own home. He failed. She failed. They destroyed one another again and again. Buffy wanted to scream her throat raw, to grab Whistler and choke from him the admission that it was all lies, but she knew. The anger and the hatred were curled deep within her, awaiting only the right conditions in which to bud and grow, as real and integral a part of her as the love. Her knees were quaking and her sides ached. Probably because she wasn't breathing. Spike's hand was a bar of ice on her arm--after that carnival of horrors, how could he bear to touch her? But air was moving in and out of her lungs again, counterpoint to the rhythm of his. Sometimes it was an advantage to have to remember to breathe.

Angelus leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, regarding them with a Cheshire Cat grin. _**"It just gets funnier every single time, doesn't it?"**_

"So, kidlets," Whistler said, "Falling on your swords isn't such a bad option, is it?"

"No! You can't know that!" Buffy spat. "Things don't have to happen that way! Any of those ways!"

"Of course I know it." Its voice was Angelus's, black velvet over razor blades, with an undercurrent even darker and colder. It trickled down through the cracks of self-doubt, and froze inside of you like dark ice, until you succumbed to frost heaves of the soul. How long had Willow held out against this thing, all alone in her skull? _**"Way down deep, in the dark corners under the basement stairs, in the place where you keep your nightmares, is a little piece of me."**_ Angelus's tongue curled out and caressed his lips with voluptuary delight, tasting imaginary blood. _ **"And that's only if you're an ordinary human being. Neither of you qualify. Vampires--you're connected to me through a thousand generations of your sires. I know your bloodlust because I am your bloodlust."**_ It prowled across the remaining space between them and ran phantom fingers down Spike's cheek, its hand passing close enough to Buffy's face to raise gooseflesh on the back of her neck. _**"Someday it's gonna be just you and the chance to inflict a little pain. All that needs happen is for you to have one... bad... day."**_

Spike's gaze had chilled to something considerably lower than room temperature. Fear lurked beneath the icy surface of his eyes, but it got no farther than that. "I'm not Angel, wanker. You can't scare me off with fairy stories and might-bes. If good intentions aren't enough, then I'll find something that is. Get a spell. Get a bloody muzzle if that's what it takes. There's a way, I'll find it."

Angelus's features blurred and shifted as he paced away, and Spike's own pale angular face turned to smirk at them, the eye in a storm of black leather. _**"Oh, yeh, there's a way. You held it in the palm of your hand and carried it around in your pocket. And then you had an O. Henry moment and traded it for her. Your soul, you pathetic git. The only thing which would have allowed you to keep her, and you gave it away to get her back. You're well and truly buggered, mate."**_ The smarmy grin broadened. _**"But seein' as I'm a compassionate bloke, I've got a proposition for you. The witch's proposition, actually."**_ It jerked a thumb down the shaft at Willow. _**"We revive her, she restores your soul."**_

Her dream from the cemetery hit Buffy full-force with the image of Spike burning up from within, consumed by his own inner light and lost to her forever. Her stomach dropped to the bottom of her gut, cold and heavy as day-old donuts. Spike cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "You'd winkle my soul back, and I'd trust you to, why?"

Faux-Spike stalked over to the lip of the Hellmouth and gestured towards the encroaching light. _**"Because I don't want the saints to come marching home any more than you do, mate. Give you a soul, and you're not an affront to the laws of nature any longer, just a second-rate copy of Peaches. May bugger up a few prophecies, but it's better than what's coming."**_

Whistler grimaced and clutched his hat, crumpling the brim. "No, no, no! Too risky! Dudley Do-Right and Nell here mucked up Rosenberg's sacrifice! You could blow out the aether and--"

The First shoved its hands in its duster pockets, threw back its bone-white head and laughed. _**"Then go for the risk-free option, children. Slit your own throats."**_

Spike stood there tight-lipped and impassive, staring himself down, the muscles in his jaw working. Impassive for Spike, at least. Fear, hope and surmise strobed across his face, all displaced in the end by that utterly insane determination which presaged something incredibly heroic, incredibly stupid, or both. At the slight flare of his nostrils, Buffy realized with instant, irrational conviction that he was considering the offer seriously.

"Spike, you can't--" Buffy cut herself off. _Can't what? Trust him? Do this to me?_

"Don't think I can handle it, love?" Spike thrust his chin out, insouciant despite the underlying tremor in his voice. "Angel managed. Hundred years of crushing guilt and general uselessness and I'm home free. Already got a jump on the rat-eating." He dredged up a chuckle. "Or is it the side effects you're worried about? I'd hunt up something to fix that bloody damn quick, and in the meantime there's no rule says I can't keep giving _you_ perfect happiness."

"That's not what I--" The dream couldn't be literal, could it? Matters of the First's trustworthiness aside, this should be Spike's decision; to pressure him was selfish, selfish beyond all reason. Wasn't she owed a little selfishness? Just a crumb? "It won't be--" Spike gazed down at her with a small, questioning smile, the shadow of heaven in the curve of those sinful lips. She dropped her head, staring at her knuckles whitening around the sword-hilt. "It won't be _you_ anymore. I--I'm sure William was a good man. But he's not... you. He--he wouldn't... wouldn't know me." She was running short of air again. "When Angel..."

Spike laid both hands on her shoulders, heedless of the sword's blade between them, and the tenderness in his eyes set the marrow of her bones afire with shame. "There is nothing," he said, in the same tone of voice that he might have used to observe that the sun rose in the east and Dawn liked anchovies, "Nothing that can make me stop loving you, Buffy. I'd...I'd be inside, somewhere. Always. Those things we saw--" He was talking to the top of her head, his breath stirring the fine hairs that had escaped her ponytail. "Told you I'd fight all the hordes of hell before I let myself hurt you, didn't I? Do anything, I said. Here's my chance to prove it, yeh? Christ, Buffy--after seeing that, how can you ever trust me without a soul?"

"After seeing that, how can you ever trust me with one?" Buffy shook her head, still focused on the toes of his boots. She knew what he was capable of; it was discovering what she was which turned her stomach. Could she ever look him in the eye again, knowing what could happen, or was she going to be stuck forever talking to his--

\--shadow. Long and black in the floodlights' glare, inseparable from her own. Stretching out away from the Hellmouth, their shadows, the shadow of the winch, and...

Buffy moved before the thought could run its course, jerking free of Spike's grasp and lunging past him to straight-arm Whistler in the throat with the hilt of her sword. Her fist met only empty air. "It seems to me," she said, "that the last time we met you were a little less not there. At least, I'm pretty sure I remember you leaving a dent when I threw you into a wall."

"Ah, crap," said Whistler, and winked out.

*****

Spike's right eyebrow joined his left in the general vicinity of his hairline. "Curiouser and curiouser. Is that a con I smell?" He settled his weight on one hip and folded his arms across his ravaged chest. "It's obvious why Morphy here'd want us to conveniently off ourselves before the big blow. Leaves him free and clear in possession of the 2001 Witch Turbo. But where's the catch in Red cursing me with a soul, aside from the obvious limitations? Somehow I don't think you're vitally concerned with my love life."

Angelus growled low in his throat, a figure of looming menace for all its insubstantiality. _** "The offer's real, Spike. And it's your only chance."**_

"I'm operating on a limited budget, mate. I don't fancy buying when I don't know the price." The dark wings of his brow swooped down to meet in a scowl over incandescent blue eyes, and Spike snapped his fingers. "The--you fucking bastard. That's it."

Buffy frowned. "What?"

"The price." Spike shrank in on himself, all the larger-than-life bravado gone, and the ghost-lines sketched about his mouth and eyes tallied every day of his hundred and forty-nine years. "All magic's got a price, and the price of your life was my soul. If Will magicks it back... you'll die. Again."

When the shock in her eyes gave way, it wasn't to an emotion so feeble as longing or nostalgia. This was _hunger,_ and there was nothing a vampire was more intimately acquainted with. The next words out of his mouth were the hardest Spike had ever spoken. "Is that what you want, love?"

Her lips parted, and her eyes grew huge and shadowy, all moss and charcoal, mist under a moonless sky. Buffy made no answer. Something he should be grateful for, most like--a quick reply to a question like that wasn't one he could trust. Seconds ticked into minutes, and beyond, while Buffy stood gazing at the sword in her hands, a slender contemplative Galatea. She lifted her head, her chin firm and her face blazing with conviction--he'd got it wrong; she was the Pygmalion here. "No."

Angelus snarled, his stolen face a distorted Kabuki-mask of rage. _**"No? You could be at peace, and certain you'd saved your world! You'd rather take a thousand-to-one chance you can save your friend too? Or can't you bear to give up your vampire fuck-toy? You have no hope, no future together--what the hell are you fighting for?"**_

Lightning flickered in her stormy eyes, and Buffy brought the sword up, wielding the long blade as lightly as a rapier. "Now. This moment. That's all anyone ever has. Maybe there's no way to win, but you know what's worse than losing? Not trying. You know what hurts more than all the worlds where we crash and burn? The ones where I'm too much of a coward to love him, and we really do die with nothing." She jabbed the sword-tip at Angelus's chest in deliberate mockery of a long-ago thrust: _You have no power here._ "There's never only one choice. Every day, for the rest of our lives, we'll have to choose again, Spike and I--to live, no matter how painful it is. Not to kill, no matter how good it feels." The words were tumbling out of her now, a passionate flood that buoyed Spike up, light and giddy as a cork. "So we weren't meant to be? Tough. We are. Come on, Spike." Buffy sheathed the sword in its cross-shoulder scabbard and strode over to the winch, the corners of her mouth tucked back in grim purpose.

Now _that_ was his girl. Spike swung in behind her. "Thought you'd never quit jawing, Slayer."

Quick, flashing Buffy-grin. "I get one inspirational moment per apocalypse. Fine print in the Slayer contract."

The First dogged their steps, flinging words at their backs like venomed darts. _**"Well, rah rah rah. The big motivational speech. Do the right thing. Easy for her to say. Half the time you don't even know what the right thing is, do you, Willy-boy?"**_ Spike's shoulder muscles tensed; his own face smirked back at him, a mocking, hateful grin which made his knuckles itch to smash it. No wonder people were lining up and taking numbers to punch him in the nose.

Buffy set both hands to her hips and surveyed the wreckage at the lip of the chasm. Spike looked over her shoulder; Xander had provided a rope ladder, but there was nothing left of it but six feet of frazzled nylon flopping mournfully over the side of the chasm. She threw a sideways glance at him, catching her lower lip in her teeth. "Can you manage with..." Her outstretched fingers hovered tentatively over his chest.

Plan B, then. It wasn't the pain; part of the whole vampire package, the ability to set pain aside at need. He wasn't vulnerable to shock, and up to a point, blood loss would only make him hungry. But he'd lost half his range of movement and there was no guarantee he could keep a grip with the amount of damage he'd taken. Spike swung his arms experimentally and flexed his hands into fists, masking another wince with a terse nod. "I'll do."

Buffy eyed him for a long moment, the general assessing her troops, then returned the nod. She checked the safety catch on the cable, climbed up on the winch and crawled out along the arm. Wrapping her legs around the heavy steel cable, she slid downwards, catching herself with both hands. The cable swayed, the hook on the end rattling against the boards below. "And they claim you never use anything you learn in gym class again." Buffy spat out an errant strand of hair and glanced up at him. "Do I look as bad as you do?"

Arms criss-crossed with nicks and scratches, face smeared with blood and dust, weeping burn-scar seared across half her cheek, eyes bloodshot and savage--Bloody fucking gorgeous. Spike grinned at her. "Worse."

He let Buffy get five or six feet down the cable before crawling out after her. Hot needles lanced through his chest as he came down off the winch arm and Spike bit his tongue hard, turning the yell of pain to a muffled snort. There just wasn't enough intact muscle left for him to exert his full strength. He gripped the slippery coils of the cable more tightly between his ankles, using the soles of his boots to brake himself, and tried to take as much of his weight off his arms as possible. Foot by foot he descended, fighting his own weakness and the bucking of the cable under Buffy's weight below. His palms were sweating. Stupid sodding stress reaction; not like it could cool him off.

**_ "Dropping arse-backwards into your grave,"_** his platinum-haired nemesis sneered. _**"Fitting. You're going to be stumbling backwards through the dark for the rest of your damned existence, Spike. And for what? A little Slayer nookie? How's that gonna play in a few years when things aren't so high and firm?"**_

"Sod off," Spike muttered, eyes fixed on the rough granite before him. Flecks of mica shimmered in the grey stone, and veins of pyrite crystals striated the walls like symbols in a vile and unknown tongue. With every foot of descent they became brighter, more regular, until the walls were a glittering latticework of crystal that melted into Daliesque crenelations of limestone or tortured layers of cracked and flaking shale. Dimension and distance squirmed like Silly Putty around them; one moment the shaft was claustrophobically close and he could all but feel the opposite wall scraping his back, and the next they were suspended in infinite space.

Buffy's boots hit the two-by-fours of the platform below with a thump. "Dawn? Are you OK?"

"Buffy!" Dawn scrambled to her feet and wrapped her sister in a bear hug, her voice spiced with panic. "Is it--is it over?"

"Not hardly, Dawnie."

Dawn backed to the far edge of the landing with a terrified squeak, pressing herself up against the wall of the shaft. _**"Now is that any way to greet an old pal?"**_ said Angelus. _**"Long time no see."**_ He looked down at Willow's netted, helpless form with contempt. _** "Poor little Willow's crapped out on me. My own fault for putting all my eggs in one basket, right?"**_ He took a step closer to Dawn, fangs bared in a leer. _**"But she's not the only one here with power, is she?"**_

Spike dropped cat-footed onto the boards and walked through Angelus with a sneer he hoped was every bit as aggravating as his doppelganger's. "It's not real, Bit. Just ignore it."

Dawn's hand twitched, as if she'd smooth his wounds over with a touch if she could. "Dumb question time. Are you all right?"

Professional inquiry, there. No squeamishness for his Niblet. "Right as rain, pet." He rubbed the edge of the burn. It was starting to itch, but there was more to his current discomfort than the injury. He could feel the Hellmouth curdling around him as the reversal neared, a prickly ache crawling around inside his bones, as if his skeleton might leap outside his skin at any minute. In the corners of his vision, faces crowded together--godlets, dozens of them, human, inhuman, and everything in between, peering over the edge of the chasm, skittering up and down the eroded walls. Spike glanced upwards; night sky capped the Hellmouth with a dome of silver-flecked indigo. Something winged and glittering swooped by overhead. Well, if they were to have an audience, he'd bloody well give them a show. "Feels like we're getting on for the witching hour, love," he called to Buffy. "What time we got?"

Buffy checked her watch, though how she could tell if it was working down here was beyond him. "Eleven forty-five." She turned to Dawn, and stroked her sister's hair with an air of finality. "There's not time to get you up."

Dawn took a breath. Nodded. Her fear was beginning to smell like a woman's, not a child's. "I'll be good here."

Spike gave Dawn's shoulder a squeeze and looked past to Willow, who thrashed like a gaffed marlin in her bonds, spine arcing as every muscle pulled taut. Willow's scent wasn't remotely human any longer. Her eyes flew open, blank black marbles in her chalk-white face. Her mouth worked for a moment. The words came out gravelly and slurred, skidding into one another like cars on ice. _**"You can't afford to ignore me, Slayer."**_

Spike heard Buffy's heart skip a beat, then resume its labors double-time. "Yeah?" she said, surface-cool. "I've had a recent influx of new income. The whole Ultimate Evil thing kind of works against you in the convinciness department."

One of the six ropes suspending the cargo net was looped over a bolt driven into the stone; Buffy unfastened it, pulled it up and slipped it over the hook at the end of the winch cable. Spike grabbed the rope on the opposite side of the platform and did likewise. Buffy climbed clockwise and Spike counterclockwise along the scaffolding to reach the next pair of ropes. The radiance below had grown stronger in the just last few minutes, shooting upwards and falling back like loops and flares of light in the corona of the sun. The glare bathed him in a constant fiberglass burn. They were presiding over the birth-pangs of a new universe, and whatever dapper beast was strolling towards Sunnydale wasn't fond of vampires at all.

Across the shaft Buffy shouted something, but Spike couldn't make her words out for the roaring in his ears. He leaped across a gap where a support beam had been dashed to kindling by falling stone, feeling the burn in more ways than one. There was the next bolt with its loop of rope. Reach out, wrap fingers around nylon, pull. One move at a time. The cargo net dipped and swayed; if he dropped the line, Willow would slide free and tumble into that pale merciless inferno. Her slight weight would have been nothing under ordinary circumstances, but working with muscle and tendon half-charred off his bones made it tricky.

Willow's head lolled on her shoulders, flopping over to stare at him with tar-pit eyes. The dart, still glowing a sickly phosphorescent green, projected from the muscle of her thigh, bobbling a little as she writhed in her bonds. Her altered voice hissed in his ear, clear as if she were resting her sharp little chin on his shoulder. _**"There's no point, William."**_

"Since when has that ever stopped me?" Spike tucked his chin down into the collar of his duster, squinted against the all-pervading light and swung back to the landing. Buffy'd already hooked her rope to the winch cable and set out to retrieve the next one. He handed his prize off to Dawn, who mouthed words he couldn't hear and clutched at his sleeve. He shook her off.

** _"None of the others trust you without the chip."_ **

Eyes swimming in light, Spike groped for the last rope among the scaffolding. There it was. Grab, lift, pull, gather his legs under him for a panther-leap across the whole breadth of the shaft.

** _"You get nothing out of this. Nothing, do you understand?"_ **

Spike dropped onto the landing and slid the final rope into place. Willow was dangling from the hook now, like cargo being taken aboard ship. "Spike!" Buffy yelled, loud and urgent enough to penetrate the white-noise crackle of building magic. "NOW!" She grabbed the cable and kicked off, hooked her feet into the mesh of the net as she and Willow soared out into empty space. The safety catch holding the winch cable in place groaned under the added weight. Spike swiped a coat-sleeve across his burning eyes, gauged the pendulum-swing of the cable, and leaped after her. He caught the cable with both hands, lost his grip, slid down and nearly knocked Buffy loose before one frantically kicking boot found purchase in a loop of the net. He caught one evanscent glimpse of Dawn's pale set face as they careened past the platform, and then the safety catch snapped and the cable unreeled with a hornet-whine of metal on metal.

Down, down, down they plummeted, swinging from wall to wall in wild free-fall. Buffy's fingers were locked around his forearms, anchoring them together like two parachuters, her nails digging through leather and into flesh. The wind of their fall tore her hair free of its tie and raked it into a golden battle-flag, ripped the slashed and scorched remains of his duster up about his ears. If he had to go, this was the way to do it--Spike threw his head back and howled, lost in the exultant rush of adrenaline. Willow was squirming and moaning between them, the force within her battling the drugged lethargy of her limbs. How much bloody cable was there, anyway? Boulders cartwheeled past them, huge slabs of cold dark stone falling down, half-molten blobs of lava spewing up, as they fell towards the armies of light.

Willow's eyes rolled back in her head while her body writhed in epileptic struggle. Her fingers crooked, clawing at the meshes of the net, and a blast of raw spellfire slammed into them, driving Spike shoulder-first against the Hellmouth wall. He felt ribs flex, just short of cracking. Buffy's face contorted over the top of Willow's head, and before they could spin out into the lighting-patterned void once more, her hand shot out, fingers latching on to the crevices in the stone. Blood oozed from beneath her nails. Spike's boot heels slammed into solid rock and they staggered onto a ledge that hadn't been there moments before. They weren't falling any longer. What had Buffy said about the Hellmouth changing? _ Because I really needed it to._ Bloody useful feature, that.

Spike braced his shoulders against the rock wall and stood shaky and panting, half-supporting Willow. Buffy sagged against him, her labored breathing slowly falling into sync with his, then straightened. No slender, battered girl beside him, but the Slayer incarnate, a blazing beacon in the void. He'd not seen her the day she'd called up the First Slayer's power to defeat Adam, but she must have looked like this.

Buffy held up her wrist, displaying the incongruously prosaic (and cracked) face of her watch. "Almost time."

Willow's body rolled and pulled free, slumping to the ground as her dead-mackerel eyes pinned them to the wall. _**"Your struggle is useless, William,"**_ she hissed. _**"You are my creature. She is theirs. The side in the great game you've chosen to champion will never accept you--what you do matters nothing to them, so long as you are what you are: Vampire. Soulless. Evil. You will _**never**_ belong in the light, and they will condemn you as the thing you are."**_

The sodding thing was right, of course. He was the bleeding Vamp of La Mancha, tilting after windmills, and the reasons why had got lost in the doing. Promise to a lady? No Slayer was an island, most especially this one, and he found himself enmeshed in an ever more complex network of obligations towards people Buffy loved, and the people who loved them, ad infinitum, but why he willingly accepted each new set of chains... Because Willow had baked him cookies once? Because Harris would probably come in handy installing that shower in the crypt? Because he didn't want Dawn ever again to look at him the way she'd looked at him in that alley? Because...

Simple, really. "Doesn't matter. 'S not why I'm doing this, y'wanker."

"Oh, really?" Willow sneered. _**"This is all from the goodness of your heart?"**_

"'Course not. Got proper selfish vampire reasons, I do." He knelt down and patted Willow's cheek through the netting. "I been thinking on it, since our little chat in the alley. Why am I doing this? Why'd I fall for a Slayer in the first place?" William, begotten of Drusilla, begotten of Angelus, begotten of Darla, begotten of Heinrich, connected in unbroken line through a thousand unknown sires to whatever ancient essence of evil had first infected a fresh human corpse and become the forebear of his kind, stared into the fathomless eyes of the thing in Willow's body, and smiled. "It's not being treated like a man. It's feeling like one. Or close as I can come." He leaned close, brushing his lips to Willow's captive ear. "I may never be a man, but I'm my own monster. Now sod off."

Snap. Only a symbolic severance, maybe, but the backlash would sting like a bitch. He'd lost something with those words, and gained nothing. He'd never get it, not really, but...he came closest to the feeling he craved not when he made her happy, but when he made her proud. Buffy's dark-fringed eyes met his and her hand ghosted up his forearm, raising the hairs on the back in the path of her fingertips. From the look in those eyes, he'd made her very proud indeed.

Every clock in Sunnydale struck midnight. The bubble in the depths popped, three minutes ahead of schedule, and the hosts of heaven exploded from the Hellmouth in a dazzling radiant swarm. Creatures of light surrounded them, legions and companies and phalanxes of them: Harrier demons, whirlwinds of razor-fledged wings and luminous eyes; Aurexi with talons of light and blades of crystal. Behind those lesser beings were figures vaster still, glowing shapes the barest glimpse of whose outlines threatened to rip body, mind, and demon asunder and leave him a scatter of ash upon the wind. Things Spike had no names for, creatures that hadn't walked the earth in the light of day since the Old Ones departed.

They sang as they came, choirs of organ-pipe voices lifted in harmonies complex beyond human comprehension. Buffy was sobbing, and so, Spike found, was he--because it was so beautiful, and because every chord was a dagger in his demon ears. The Hellmouth rang with the bell-note thunder of their wings, one great sounding-box for the approaching stormfront of heaven.

Willow screamed, a mangled outpouring of slurred nonsense, and her hands spasmed in clumsy imitation of her usual precision. Darkness boiled from her suddenly-limp body, every orifice vomiting forth smoking columns of chill foul power that merged and swirled up in a midnight hurricane, forming a figure or horror and despair, its eyeless sockets oozing pestilence, its slavering maw ringed with serrated rows of ebony fangs. Scabrous raven-black wings mantled across the breadth of the shaft, and sulfurous clouds obscured the hosts of light. Spike half expected the background music to strike up _Night On Bald Mountain_. The apparition threw back its head and wailed, taloned arms spread to rend and crush.

A maelstrom of glory whirled around them, illuminating the writhing sheets of shadow-smoke from within. A Harrier tumbled past, its severed wings bleeding contrails of light. A basso rumble built in the surrounding stone, shaking their bones to jelly as the earth itself cried out in agony. The thing in Willow's body gave a last despairing screech as searing, pure white radiance blasted up through the shaft of the Hellmouth--Hellmouth no longer--and the shadow overhead tattered like melting celluloid and burnt away.

Spike ducked turtle-like into the remains of his duster, and retreated into the long black upthrust shadow of the ledge, flattening himself against the cliff-face. Two feet to either side and he'd be a ball of flame in seconds. Buffy knelt at Willow's side, peeling back an eyelid; the sclera was bloodshot and the pupil a pinpoint of jet in the green iris. "It worked!" Her excited shout was half-drowned by the roar of silver wings. "Willow's free!"

Willow's waxen face remained motionless, and her heartbeat stumbled and skipped, so faint Spike could barely catch it over the polyphonous rejoicing of the Harriers. "Balls," he muttered, "Free, maybe, but not clear. She's fading."

Buffy looked up at the seemingly infinite length of cable stretching out of sight overhead. "At least she's a lot lighter than that demon I had to haul up last time." She sat down and began methodically ripping Willow's skirt into strips; after a moment's confusion Spike realized what she was up to, picked up a strip of cloth and began wrapping it around his exposed hands. It might keep him from combusting for a few minutes, anyway.

A Harrier wheeled and curvetted above them, its whirlwind of eyes gazing down upon them with aloof and alien regard. YOU HAVE SERVED THE POWERS WELL, SLAYER, the organ-chorus voice intoned. IN ENSNARING THE VAMPIRE YOU HAVE ASSURED OUR VICTORY, AND SOON WE SHALL CLEANSE YOUR WORLD OF ALL TAINT. THERE WILL BE NO FEAR, NO DOUBT. ONLY ORDER AND PEACE.

Buffy was on her feet facing it, her right hand closing on Spike's left with crushing force. "Taint? Like Xander? Like Anya? What about Willy the Snitch? He serves drinks to demons. Or Mr. Kohlermann the butcher? Or Sandra, or Clem, or Spike, or--me? The Slayer's power is born of darkness, or haven't you seen the E! Behind The Slaying special?"

ALL WHO ARE TOUCHED WITH DARKNESS MUST BE CLEANSED. ALL SAVE YOU, SLAYER. YOUR LINE WAS CREATED OF DARKNESS, THE BETTER TO FIGHT IT. WE DO NOT GRUDGE YOUR EXISTENCE, BUT YOU ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY. THERE WILL BE NO DARKNESS TO FIGHT. YOU MAY REST.

"Bloody white of you, mate," Spike snarled.

"This is cleansing of the ethnic variety, in other words? You're going all Kosevo on our collective asses?" Buffy whipped her sword from its scabbard and aimed it at the hovering demon, raging at heaven. "Is this a game to you? Black pieces here, white pieces there, and who cares if the pawns get knocked off the board? I don't serve you! I'm not doing any of this for YOU! If this is the side of good I'm not on it! I quit, do you hear me? I QUIT! I don't care about your victory!" She launched the sword upwards, striking for the Harrier's heart, presuming it had one. "I care about_** them**_, the people out there in that town! I'm fighting for them, not you, and if you want to erase any taint then you can start with me!"

AS YOU WISH. The Harrier's wing flicked out and bowled Buffy backwards with a vicious swipe of its razor plumage. Her sword shattered against the rock. As she rolled and dodged the next wing-blow Spike vamped out and leaped to join her, heedless of the pitiless light that shone now all around them. Fists and fangs against the hosts of heaven. Spike threw back his head and laughed, long and joyful--if there was ever a fight he couldn't be sure of winning, it was this one. He grabbed Buffy's hand with smoking fingers and pulled her to her feet. "Come on, y'bastards! We'll take on the lot of you!"

*****

Dawn clung frantically to the wooden platform as the earth rippled beneath her. Overhead the wheel of the heavens shuddered, and constellations slipped, fractured, and coalesced into new patterns. Below, the strata of the earth shifted and groaned as rivers of ancient power that flowed through the beds of stone turned in their courses. Rows of avid, inhuman faces leaned forwards, watching, watching--"Buffy?" Her sister couldn't hear her, she was certain, but she couldn't help trying. "What's happening?" she screamed. Another tremor shook the Hellmouth, and part of the scaffolding shattered with a gunshot crack and toppled into the depths.

The dark man in the rusty tailcoat and top hat grinned at her and winked through the missing lens of his sunglasses. "Somebody finally listening to my advice, _**petite blanc.**_ They changing teams." He whistled through his teeth. "But by damn, I never expect they make their own league."

*****

Where his hand touched hers, pain fled. Spike skimmed the contours of her shoulder, the brush of warm skin against cool fingertips sending a continuous electric thrill both of them. Her light didn't burn, and every scraped-raw nerve in his body sang with her presence, drowning out the painful music of the spheres. Each tawny wave of her hair was an aurora borealis, and the deep-water hues of her eyes were an oasis in the desert; sizzling heat became languorous warmth in their shade. The intangible cord running from his heart to hers with detours through parts south pulled suddenly taut, and Buffy's sword pinwheeled to the ground. They didn't need weapons for this. Trails of dark flame followed the path of his hand through supercharged air, and the Harrier darted forward, sensing their distraction. There was an explosive, noiseless flash, and it retreated just as swiftly.

He'd always thought the thing about fireworks going off was metaphorical.

Rapt in his eyes as he was in hers, Buffy traced the lines of his cheek as though his face were the eighth wonder of the world. Spike buried his face in her neck and inhaled the heady aroma of exertion and waking arousal. Buffy's head fell back, presenting the perfect arch of her throat for his delectation. Her skin was bittersweet beneath his tongue, tasting of salt and ash and promises. Hands, arms, lips--had to touch. More touch. More Buffy. Her hands were on him, balm to fevered flesh. Should've hurt, with the shape he was in, but the pain was a far-off irrelevant thing.

In the back of his head Cool, Rational Spike observed that the middle of an apocalypse was hardly the place for a nice snog, but he'd never listened to Cool, Rational Spike before in his life and why the hell should he start now? They were moving through liquid glass, it felt like, pinned between incomprehensibly vast forces, carbon about to crystalize into diamond. He had all the time there was to lick the pooling sweat from the hollow of her throat where her pulse throbbed below, the molten heart of his world. All the time in the world to trace the blue highways of her veins, and gasp and shudder with each eager nip along the angle of his jaw and the curve of his ear. He hitched her up, back to the wall, and his knees almost gave out when she began licking and nuzzling her way along the ridges of his brow, delicate white teeth grazing deliciously against bone. Light fast panting breaths shook their entwined bodies as her hands glided up his sides, and the air was alive with erotic energy.

He was inside her now, sweet and slow, building towards hard and fast. Not entirely sure how, since he couldn't remember any such mundane intermediaries as undressing, but this was the Hellmouth, after all. There were gods and demons all around them, angels in the architecture. He'd said he'd give them a show, hadn't he? _Feast your eyes, wankers._ Buffy met him, matched him, mastered him and made him love it. This was the woman with courage enough to let her mortal enemy into her heart and her bed, the woman with life enough in her to tame Death. She lay open to him, white goddess, dark mother, Queen of the bloody Damned for all he cared; the only thing that mattered was that she was _Buffy_ and sod the allegories. This wasn't just sex, though their bodies were pressed close enough to melt into one another, grinding together in warm slow taffy-pull ecstasy, and his cock was like to die of happiness. This wasn't the sterile spiritual rapture William had dutifully attempted every Sunday, though with every stroke his whole being was singing hosannahs. This was Buffy in him, and him in Buffy, hearts and minds and bodies, soul and demon.

Connection. What he'd yearned for all his life and all his death, to be part of something greater than himself. Something grand, something glorious, something effulgent. He hadn't found it in darkness, he couldn't find it in light, but all along it was here, in the vast and intricate tree of being and becoming that flourished in the intersection of the two. In people, billions of them, walking around like Happy Meals he wasn't going to indulge in because they made existence more interesting as something other than lunch. He was part of it, through Buffy, but also through a thousand other lesser strands--not because it was wrong, or right, but because for reasons sublime or ridiculous his existence had touched that of someone else and wrought a change in both of them. He'd _seen_ them, and could never wholly dismiss them again. He could feel them all, Willow dark and silent, Dawn railing at the gods on the platform above, Xander bleeding in the wreckage, Tanner searching dazed through the bodies for survivors, and dozens, hundreds, thousands of others, witting and unwitting, laughing, shopping, sneezing.

This was what Red had been shooting for in the alleyway behind the Magic Box, he realized; a network of minds and hearts to channel the power of the Key, but a thousandfold greater, a living dynamo six billion strong. The power lying quiescent in Dawn was the force that knit worlds together--neither good nor evil, the raw green life-stuff of the universe. The power embodied in, and called forth by, the dance. Their dance. He and Buffy, equal and opposite. Vampire and Slayer, male and female, the quick and the dead, good and evil, yin and yang, light and darkness, each of them bearing within themselves the seeds of the other. Creation and Destruction, locked in an eternal cycle. The world was the interplay of both principles, and you couldn't have one without the other; the universe would collapse. Both were vital. Necessary. There could be no birth without death, no fire without ashes. There was no end to the dance...

...but you could change the steps. You could be partners, not combatants. Bound to one another, connected, by love and not hate.

Power, quiescent no longer, flowed through the conduits of life itself, drawn to their union as naturally and inevitably as water flowing downhill. They were soaring, climbing, fighting, fucking, riding the crest of the wave into shore. Buffy was gasping, eyes clenched shut, her body convulsing around him for an eternal, ecstatic moment--8.0 on their personal Richter scale--and he was dissolving in her, with her, effervescing together as a fountain of emerald light blasted outwards through the prism of their conjoined bodies and roared through the Hellmouth like the sea through a tidal bore. Around them the intricate cat's-cradle of power spinning out across the aether from the Hellmouth frazzled into moire static and reformed again in a new pattern. The Balance shifted, and settled, and neither heaven nor hell could claim dominion over the earth.

Spike collapsed into Buffy's arms, spent beyond telling, limp as the end of a week-long shagfest. Given that they both still seemed to be fully dressed, he wasn't completely clear on whether or not actual shagging had taken place--reality seemed to be a bit on the subjective side of late--but he certainly felt as if he'd just received the most thorough, loving, and complete fuck of his existence. He rolled over, gazing up at the distant circle of the sky.

"That was..." Buffy was still plastered to his side, all flushed and Raggedy-Ann-loose in the joints. Warm, sweaty Slayer. That was good.

"Yeh."

"We won, didn't we?"

"Not sure, love. Was it a fight?" Her heart pounded in his ears and Harriers tumbled past his rapidly-glazing eyes, their victory-song turned to one of mourning and despair. They swirled away in a whirlpool of wings, sucked back from whence they'd come. Pretty. Like snowflakes. Or the _Pequod_. Ahab should have just given the bloody whale a blow job...or should that be a blowhole job? _Sorry, mate, brain's closed for renovations._ He'd just lie here for awhile. Several decades ought to do it.

The lurid glare of fire on stone splashed the walls overhead. Down from on high snaked the five-clawed dragon he and Xander had watched fly over his crypt, riding the currents of air. Astride its gold and scarlet-maned neck was Dawn, her face salt-white and her eyes glittering with determination. "Buffy!" she shouted. "Spike! It's collapsing! We've got to get out!" The nightmare muzzle poked up over the ledge and snorted clouds of brimstone at them. Buffy gagged weakly and tried to roll away; the dragon-god rumbled something in antique Chinese dialect--incomprehensible, but undoubtedly sarcastic. "Get on!" Dawn screamed. The dragon pitched over like a log in a millrace, hovering in mid-air and offering them access to its back. "NOW!"

For a second Spike lay there blinking stupidly and trying to figure out exactly how he was supposed to do that when every muscle in his body was the consistency of overcooked spaghetti. The painful subsonic groan that presaged an earthquake stabbed his eardrums, and he stumbled to his feet, his brain finally bullying his unwilling limbs into answering to their nominal master. Buffy was forcing herself upright at his side. They hoisted Willow's body over the dragon's shoulders and melted against the creature's side for a moment; then Buffy hauled herself aboard, grabbed Spike by the collar of his duster and picked him up bodily. Spike flung a leg over the dangerously sharp ridge of the dragon's spine, grabbed a double handful of tufted scarlet mane and slumped against Buffy's back. The huge barrel of the dragon's scaled body was painfully warm through his jeans, what was left of them. Like riding a sodding radiator. The dragon rolled one basketball-sized eye skywards with a steam-engine hiss and further unfavorable commentary on foreign devils. Then it was rocketing upwards.

Some one of these days, Spike thought, he was really going to have to buckle down and pick up some Mandarin.

*****

Willow's eyes fluttered opened to undulating waves of copper and gold scales. She stared at them for awhile until a thought formed, and one of the many things she would be ashamed of later was that said thought wasn't _What have I done?_ but _It's all gone!_ She could feel the dry-socket ache of her missing magic above all the more prosaic pains--nothing borrowed, nothing blue, all vanished as if it had never existed at all. She hadn't realized how much space the First had taken up inside her till it was gone. She was a husk, a hollow Willow-shell, abandoned by the hermit crab of evil on the beach of life. Even her metaphors sucked.

She was draped belly-down across something uncomfortable and jouncy. A mechanical bull, maybe. Except, scales. OK, a mechanical post-Ascension Mayor, then. She was scrunched between someone's butt (pert) and someone else's knees (bony, excessively white), the latter insufficiently concealed by half-shredded black denim. Flying out of a rapidly-disintegrating Hellmouth, on the...whatever. It began to sink in that they'd rescued her. Buffy had rescued her. Res-cued. Repeat it often enough and the word lost all meaning.

Gods were melting. Willow could feel them popping like soap bubbles, going wherever it was gods went then the world wasn't coming to an end. Her own body was abandoning her, cell by cell. It wasn't a physical wound--she ached all over, but the blood and bruises weren't the problem. You couldn't just take two aspirin and bounce back from an Ultimate Evilectomy. When it came down to it, she wasn't sure she wanted to.

"...and the flappy eyeball guys were starting to get out." Dawn was seated further astern, talking in a jittery, nerve-driven staccato, almost too fast to understand. "And then it was like, all this green light just _whooshed_ out of me and _did_ something, kind of like Willow's spell, except it didn't hurt, and I think I passed out. When I woke up all the flappy guys were being sucked back, and the walls were falling in, and all these god things were just standing around _watching_ like it was Wimbledon or something. So I got mad and yelled at them to get off their stupid divine butts and help me, and dragon guy here flew me down to get you. I totally rescued you guys, didn't I? I am igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, I so rock! I mean, OK, world-saveage bennie points go to you guys for whatever the heck you did--"

Became the focus for probably the biggest-ass piece of involuntary tantric magic in the last few centuries, but who's counting? Willow Rosenberg, Plucky Girl Researcher, might have figured out that putting two horny supernatural creatures of opposite alignment in the same unstable dimensional vortex as the Key to the Universe might cause stuff to happen on a larger scale than the mere shorting-out of scrying spells. Willow Rosenberg, Evil Genius, seemed to have missed the memo. A loopy giggle burbled up inside and fizzled before making it outside. Sex had finally saved the world--that had to be a first for Sunnydale.

Rolling grey nausea overwhelmed her, and when it lifted, they were no longer in the Hellmouth, and Anya and Giles were pulling her off the dragon's back. Dorsal spines scraped her side through the thin rayon of her blouse. Giles's large and competent hands were on her shoulders, and Anya's small bony nervous ones were around her ankles. Willow kept her eyes shut. She didn't want to see them, didn't want them to see her. The hands kept on moving, wrapped her up in something--the remains of Spike's duster?--and laid her down gently on the ground. The smell of burnt leather clogged her nose. There was something wrong with her brain, she was sure. Thoughts drifted in and out of her head, little scraps of fact and feeling, but nothing related to anything else. _I almost killed Dawn. My toes are cold. There are dead bodies all around me. I could have picked the bell pepper off the pizza. Everyone will hate me now._

She could see each individual tile in the mosaic, but taking the necessary step back to see the whole picture was no longer something she was capable of. No, that was a lie. She was capable. She was just terrified of seeing that picture. She was Dorian Grey, approaching the cobweb-shrouded painting in the attic.

Please let me die before it sinks in.

Tara was sitting beside the winch, rubbing a large purple knot on her forehead and looking as if she might throw up. Tara not crawling over to her side, Tara not looking at her, Tara...it was because she was hurt, right? Possibly concussed. _Or maybe she just hates me._ Willow's mind fuzzed over at the thought. She couldn't exist in a world where Tara hated her, could she? It wasn't possible. If X, then Y, and Willow disappears in a puff of logic.

Spike sat down heavily beside Tara. His exposed chest was pitted with angry red-black burns; had she done that? Of course she had. She remembered flinging the bolts of power at him and grinning as his flesh sizzled. Someone must have turned up the pilot light on her soul; guilt spread and exploded like wildfire. She'd done a lot more than that. Willow closed her eyes, but that was worse; she could see men screaming and worse than dying, flesh melting off bones as crazies went up like torched Ents. If she weren't too weak to move she'd be barfing her lungs up right about now. There was nothing left inside with which she could fight the memories. No justifications, no excuses--all her lances shattered and her shields riven by the harsh clarity of hindsight.

She'd laid everything that was Willow on the altar of expedience, burnt it to ashes, and it had all been for nothing, all that death and pain and guilt and sacrifice. She'd thought of every angle, come up with a plan that covered them all, and that plan... would have ended up killing Buffy anyway. The First Evil had been ahead of her at every step, playing on her insecurity and pride with the virtuosity of a Paganini. For all her cleverness, the solution had slipped through her fingers, and it had all been Buffy, stumbling onto a serendipitous solution that didn't require anyone to be nailed to a tree at all. Now she had nothing to show but bloodstains that went right down to the bone. She made Lady MacBeth look like an amateur. She could smell Bench's blood on her hands, and she would be seeing the gaslight blue of burning souls behind her eyelids for the rest of her life.

"Xander hasn't come back," Anya said, her voice shrill with panic. "He hasn't come back and he promised me he wouldn't die. He promised!"

Xander? Oh, God, Xander. She'd thrown Xander fifty feet through the air, buried him in debris, and _laughed_. She moaned, torn between hope that he lived and fear that if he did, he'd look right past the pixie face and see her for the monster she was.

Buffy knelt beside Spike, smoothing springy coils of pale hair back from his drawn face. She didn't look much better than the vampire did; her wounds were individually less serious, but there were more of them. Willow cringed away, but Buffy didn't hear her little whimper of anguish. Or at least, she wasn't reacting to it. Why should she? It was Buffy's job to save the world, to save you, but that didn't mean she'd be be your best friend afterwards, ever again. Buffy looked around at the blast radius surrounding the crater, her eyes betraying overwhelming weariness. "Are all the crazies out by the cars? What's--what's left of them? We've got to get out of here, fast, and I don't want to leave anyone behind if I can help it--Tara, can you--?"

"Don't think more magic's the best of ideas just now," Spike said. He sounded hoarse, like his throat was sunburned. "I can sniff Captain Drywall out. And anyone else left alive out there." He started to heave himself to his feet again, only to fall back on his ass as another quake-tremor rocked the construction site.

"Right. Take Willow with you--this popsicle stand could blow any minute." Buffy scooped the dazed Tara up and started for the cars, corralling a stray crazy on the way. A trio of raggle-haired old women passed a single eye between them and cackled and pointed at the departing Slayer, crying out something in _koine_ before disappearing into a tangle of girders.

The salt-sting of tears seeped through her lashes and trickled down her cheeks, weak and useless as the rest of her. The pathetic thing was, she didn't want to die. Not now, not without telling Tara that she loved her, without telling Buffy she was sorry, that she'd never meant things to come to this. But oh, she didn't want to live like this either, with the knowledge of what she'd done a constant acid-burn in her stomach. If only she could close her eyes and open them on some deserted island with white beaches and green palms, far removed from everyone and everything else. She could live there for twenty years, and survive on coconuts and fish, and pour out the vileness in her soul to a volleyball, and then maybe she'd be clean enough to live in the same world as Tara. As Buffy. As anyone.

No. She was fooling herself. She'd never be clean again.

She felt a sickening jerk and a lift; Spike had picked her up. He vamped out and tipped his head back, testing the breeze, and after a moment's concentration, started towards a low point in the sea-wrack of shattered concrete and metal. Just Spike in game face, lumpies and fangs and exhausted golden eyes, an ordinary vampire of ordinary vampire abilities, and not the figure of ebony flame she'd glimpsed on the ledge, merged with the figure of light just before everything went green. She wondered if maybe, before the life and will ebbed out of her entirely, they could talk--Spike understood certain things about her better even than Tara or Xander. There were other things Spike would never understand. For all his changes, he retained at his core the straightforward and horrible innocence of a creature incapable of guilt.

Incapable of guilt. That sounded awfully attractive right about now. It had a ring to it. "Spike..."

Without slowing his pace, the vampire looked down at her, breaking into a grin. One nice thing about Spike being evil himself, he seldom held grudges about the times when you were. "Will! How're you do--"

"Dying." The tears rolling down her cheeks were genuine, all right.

His gaze slid away from hers; of course he knew. Every predator's sense he possessed must have been screaming the news in eighty-point type. If he hadn't been checking for scent trails he'd probably have lapsed back into human shape on the spot. Spike couldn't resist a woman's tears, any way you sliced it--he had to console her or kill her. "There, pet, we'll get you to hospital as soon as I dig Harris out of here."

Hospital. Sickening thought; what if they _did_ save her? "I don't want... I don't deserve..."

Amazing, how his eyes could go all melty even in game face, the tawny yellow softening to hazy primrose. "Don't be daft. I've killed more men than you've got freckles, love, and here I am. You've done more good than bad, right? Saved the world six or seven times, haven't you?" Spike gave her arm an awkward pat, his eyes suspiciously damp. He cocked his head, obviously trying to work out a compromise between the reassurance he wanted to offer and his imperfect understanding of the strictures of human guilt. "And you're sorry now, so that's all right, yeh?"

Spike sounded so hopeful, and the look in his eyes...Spike, of all people, needed her to be sorry. Wanted the comfort of knowing that Willow Rosenberg felt bad about what she'd done, as he never could, and all was therefore right with the world again.

Her tears were half from anger now. A wave of pitiful resentment washed through her. She was spoiled. Ruined. Why couldn't they just let her go? But no, Buffy was the Slayer, and Spike kind of liked her and selfishly wanted to keep her around, so here she was. Rescued. So they could feel all hero-y and she could suffer for a vampire's moral edification. Spike wouldn't be sorry, if his grandiose plan to save the world had fallen apart in a firestorm of death and chaos. He might be disgusted with himself for failing Buffy, angry at his lack of control, frustrated because a plan hadn't worked... but no guilt. No long nights tormented by thoughts of what you'd done for a vampire, no--no nothing. Because _you_ would be gone. Replaced by a demon. A fate worse than death.

And wasn't that exactly what she deserved?

The earth shuddered as a quarter-acre of ground adjacent the Hellmouth dropped twenty-five feet straight down in a cloud of dust and ash. A slab of concrete ahead of them emitted a ponderous groan and crashed to the ground. Spike glanced over his shoulder with a harried growl; he was skirting the edges of the rubble now, sniffing the air like a peroxide bloodhound. "You'll be all right if I set you down, pet?"

"Spike...I asked you once to do me a favor."

His eyelids dropped to half-mast and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He had a brain under those bleached locks, Spike did. "Answer's still the same, pet. Better take your chances with modern medicine. I may joke about it, but--" He broke off, embarrassed. "I was willing to turn you that night in the dorm because I didn't--wasn't...fond of you then. 'S different now." His fangs indented his lower lip for a second, clean sharp whiteness against soft pink. "Been down this road before, and it never ends up anyplace good. Siring someone--it changes everything."

She'd met her vampire self. She knew exactly what would change. More frighteningly, she knew exactly what wouldn't. She looked up at him and smiled. "That's what I'm counting on."

Willow flung her arm up in a clumsy arc, smashing Spike in the mouth and sawing her wrist against his fangs. Her skin tore like rice paper against the razor points of his canines, spilling precious crimson across the milky flesh of her arm. Spike's nostrils flared at the blood-scent and his eyes flashed metallic gold as wounded-starving-demon reflexes overwhelmed him. Cool lips closed on the wound, sucking down a greedy mouthful as fangs set in flesh--his Adam's apple bobbed once, but before the pleasure-pain of the bite could really set in Spike dropped out of game face, coughing and spitting her blood back in her eyes. Expending all her hoarded strength, Willow lunged up and sank her teeth into the ragged wound on his chest, tearing at the healing scabs. "Will, what the fuck--OW!"

Cool salty fluid flooded her mouth. The movies had it all wrong--vampire blood tasted terrible, or at least tepid, half-congealed vampire blood sucked out of a semi-cauterized burn wound and flavored with charred cloth and liberal amounts of dirt was pretty darn disgusting. But oh--=power.= Willow felt like the time when she was eight and she and Xander had snuck the Manischewitz from her father's liquor cabinet into the back yard disguised as Kool-Aid. Her head whirled. It should come with frilly paper umbrellas, vampire blood. "Whole big sucking thing," she giggled, and then her stomach revolted and she almost threw up the pitiful mouthful she'd managed to choke down. Was it enough? Normally Spike would have had to drain her, but she was so close to death already, maybe it would work. Hands grabbed her shoulders and tore her away, but too late, she hoped. Spike looked for once like the corpse that he was, his face sickly with terror. Willow smiled up at him with blood-smeared lips. Silly vampire. Didn't he know he wasn't supposed to feel bad about any of this?

The ground was rumbling underneath them and there was yelling and running and hollering in the background. The world fractured into a series of still images: Buffy herding crazies, Anya screaming for Xander, Giles pulling Xander's mangled body from beneath a fallen pillar while Spike grit his teeth and braced half a ton of rust-streaked steel over their heads, Tara bending over her, weeping--where had Tara come from? It was nice, though, to see her one last time before the end. The distant pressure on her fingers might even be Tara holding her hand. Her body would die and her soul would be ejected into the eternal stasis of the aether. Neither heaven nor hell for Willow Danielle Rosenberg--just nothing. Forever. The demon would take her body and the others would have to kill it. They'd have to. Just like they'd killed Jesse, just like they'd killed so many others, without a second thought, because that was what you did with monsters. They never talked about Jesse. They'd never talk about her. Not only existence wiped out, but all remembrance as well.

The potent elixir of Spike's blood burned through her system as the newly-budded demon unfolded to fill that terrible empty space within her. Did demons bud? Or was there a demon bank somewhere from which she'd just made a withdrawal? She wondered what it would be like, her new demon. Exactly like her Anya-summoned vampire double, or different? Did the vampire who sired you make a difference? Something in her mourned never finding out. Maybe she wouldn't be curious when she was a vampire. Well, duh, no, she'd be dusty. And vampires were nothing like the person whose body they appropriated, anyway. Unless they were Spike, who was so very, very William, and then there was Harmony, and could you even _tell_ the difference there, and..._what if Angel was the exception, not the rule?_ But it was too late to worry about that now, and she couldn't, wouldn't think about it because she was dying and it didn't matter, did it? Buffy would never allow her to rise. They'd cut off her head or burn her or something and in a few minutes she'd be nothing, nothing, nothing.

She couldn't wait.


	37. Chapter 37

When Anya walked to the vending machine and back, she passed doctors with clipboards and nurses in crisp white uniforms, but deep down, she still expected monks.

She hated hospitals with a passion which exceeded Buffy's by several factors of magnitude. None of the others realized this, or would have understood why, not even Spike; puppy that he was, he'd grown up in a brave new post-industrial world where carbolic acid washes and ether and the Public Health Acts were the order of the day. A century's worth of progress couldn't wipe out a millennia's worth of certainty: a hospital was where you went to die.

She frowned at the shiny rows of greasy, sugary, unhealthful snack food. Why, in an institutions supposedly devoted to improving the lot of mankind, did they encourage you to eat this stuff? Return business, probably. Anya looked for the distinctive bright red wrapper of the Chocolate Hurricane, even though it was a weird off-brand chocolate bar that could only be got by special order or in the lairs of evil clowns. They were Xander's favorite, and she always checked. Even if he couldn't eat one now, it was the thought that counted, though of course, the action of buying one would count even more than the thought.

Thwarted, she finally punched the button for a Three Musketeers, tucked it into her purse, and set off down the long sterile corridor. It was hushed in the intensive care ward, but never quiet. Voices fell to whispers the moment the speakers crossed the threshold, shoulders grew hunched and footsteps tentative. But there was always noise, always the whoosh of tubes sucking out and needles pumping in, the faint hum and click of machinery. Important noises, acting like they knew what they were doing, acting like they helped, but she knew better. All they did was mask the sound of labored breathing and the moans of the dying. Anya hated them all. She wanted to jump up screaming and run around the ward, pulling everyone's tubes out and smashing the machines.

She didn't. She sat down in the uncomfortable straight-backed chair and crossed her legs and arranged her purse in her lap.

"I'm back, Xander," she whispered. "I realize you can't hear me, but I'm going to keep talking to you anyway, because I'm really scared and talking helps. Not much, but some. I'm scared you're going to die. I don't want you to die. But I'm more scared that you'll live, and that you won't want to. That you'll think it's not worth going on because you're hurt very badly. So I just want to tell you some things. I love you. I still want to marry you. Even if it turns out that you're paralyzed and can't walk or satisfy me sexually. You have a lot of parts, Xander, and while I like the ones between your legs a lot, they're not as important as the one here." She laid a hand on his chest and bent closer and closer, until she was whispering in his ear. They didn't have any tubes in his ear. An oversight, she was sure. "And that one will work forever. So please don't die, and please don't want to."

Xander looked pale and awful, with a day's worth of dark stubble and dusky purple cumulo-nimbus bruises spreading beneath the waxy surface of his skin. None of the surviving crazies looked this bad. She could see a few of them from her chair at Xander's side. Earthquake victims. The Hellmouth's collapse had given them a wonderful excuse for bringing in half a dozen unconscious people. Anya had decided that she approved of Daniel Tanner--he sat in the background and got things done, quietly, efficiently--well, as efficiently as someone recently insane could manage. He was loyal, and Anya could appreciate that in a man. Tanner had been talking to Social Services last night, trying to work something out for the last of his charges. At least Xander had insurance. As long as he had his job, which he might not have for long, because there were only so many openings in a construction company for people who couldn't walk for an indeterminate length of time.

Maybe it would be OK for her to really hate Willow now. But it wouldn't do any good, Willow being dead and all. There was nothing more unsatisfying than pre-empted vengeance.

"Anya?"

Buffy and Dawn stood behind the plate-glass observation window, tropical fish in a sterile aquarium--Dawn with her nose pressed to the glass, Buffy standing back a bit, with her arms folded across her stomach. She waved, pointing towards the door with raised eyebrows. Anya got up and pushed the swinging doors to the ward open. "I don't think you're supposed to come in if you aren't related, but I don't particularly care. The nurse can throw you out when she comes back."

"We were downtown for Dawn's custody hearing," Buffy whispered. Infected by the silence meme already. "So afterwards we thought we should...has he...said anything?"

"No. The doctors said a lot of things after you left last night. If he wakes up today it would be good, but he hasn't. Yet."

They followed her back to Xander's bed. Dawn made a wary detour around the bed of the nearest crazy, a blonde woman with fingernails bitten to the quick, but the woman only watched her pass by with dull, incurious eyes. Anya's magpie brain filed the incident away. A second later, "You're not the Key any longer, are you? That's probably for the best since no one really understood the whole Key thing to begin with."

Dawn gave the blonde woman a look--relieved, wistful, confused. "Yeah. They didn't make with the green glowy soliloquies last night at the ER, either. Closing the Hellmouth must have used me all up." She forced a laugh. "Not like it makes a big difference. All I had was a superpower trust fund."

"True," Anya agreed. "And you didn't even get to live off the interest." She supposed the monks who'd made Dawn had finally been proven right. They'd thought maybe the power of the Key could be used for good, and closing the Hellmouth was good. It made more sense than Xander's scenario of Key Woman in a domino mask and spandex. Or perhaps it was bad, since she'd closed it after the reversal. In which case the Knights of Byzantium were right. Yes, better all around to be done with the Key business altogether. She missed Xander's stupid scenarios. Anya took his hand, tracing the calluses with the tip of one finger. "Did the hearing go well?"

"It went fine. I'm well-adjusted and eat meals containing all four food groups." Dawn stared down at Xander, chewing her lower lip. "He's still--he's not half healed already. I keep forgetting that's normal."

Buffy stood there holding on to Xander's other hand with tears threatening to spill over her cheeks, saying nothing. The burn on her face was half-healed already. It wasn't fair. Willow should have picked on someone her own size. Anya gave them both a bright and artificial smile. "Have you cut Willow's head off yet?"

Buffy made a choking noise and bright red spots appeared on her cheeks. Anya regarded her with suspicion. "That is the correct procedure for suspected vampirism, isn't it? Cut the head off? Burn the body? Before they have a chance to rise as a soulless bloodsucking fiend and kill even more people than--" Her sentence ran into a sob and derailed. Buffy stood there clutching Xander's hand, looking small and miserable. Dawn fiddled with her hair, looking tall and gawky.

"I can't just--" Buffy started. She dropped Xander's hand and began worrying the collar of her blouse between thumb and forefinger in the gesture that always meant she was hiding something. "We don't know for sure she'll--it might not work. I haven't even told her parents yet. It's _Willow."_

"No, Buffy, it's not," Anya snapped. She wrapped her fingers around Xander's and closed her eyes, feeling the hot prickly sensation of having run dry of tears. "That's the whole point, isn't it?"

"Ahn?"

Something was clinging to her hand. Anya looked down with a broken gasp of joy. Xander's eyes were open, clouded with pain and morphine. "Hey," he croaked.

"Hey," she replied, wrapping his limp hand in her shaking ones. She looked up at Buffy. "You can go away now."

Xander made a raspy noise of protest, but Buffy shook her head. "No, she's right, you need to rest, I'll come back later with Wi-with--when you're more awake. She grabbed Dawn's arm and pulled her sister towards the door as an irate nurse bore down upon the both of them full of stern admonishments about visiting hours and restrictions. Holding Xander's hand with all her might, Anya barely noticed when the door banged shut behind them.

*****

Spike hooked his fingers into the coarse black cloth of the last Bringer's robe, heaved it up by the scruff of its neck and swung it head-first into the nearest wall. Bone met stone with a sickening crunch, and the mutilated face disappeared in a drenching cloud of scarlet mist that should have obscured the memory of another pale, desperate face from his mind, but only succeeded in etching it deeper. He let go, and the body squelched to the cavern floor. Behind him, Buffy dispatched her foe, and the two of them crouched in tense formation in the middle of the cave, listening for any sign of more Harbingers. The only sound was their own breathing and the metronome drip of distant water.

Buffy picked up her dropped flashlight, squared her shoulders and twirled it around the cavern's circumference. "One altar destroyed, check; assorted minions squished, check the second."

Spike relaxed a trifle. Relax one notch more and he'd be flat on his back. If someone had told him a week ago there'd come a point when he'd get sick of killing things, he would have laughed in their faces, but tonight came damned close. The remaining Harbingers milled through the tunnels with the aimless despair of ants who'd lost their queen; this wasn't a fight, it was just mopping up. He licked a smear of Harbinger blood off his knuckles and spat it out with a grimace. Still tasted like shit. He pointed at one of the dark openings in the cavern wall. "We been down that one yet?"

Buffy's eyes followed his outstretched hand, as if the effort of moving her entire head was too much, then turned with a resigned and unfeminine grunt. "No. Damn."

The two of them trudged off down the tunnel, passing the abandoned cavern where the crazies had set up shop. The tunnel made several serpentine bends, shook itself straight, and decamped in a smaller cave furnished with a cot, a desk, and a bootlegged electrical cable. A laptop sat in the middle of the desk, and when Buffy nudged the mouse, the screen leaped to life, casting a crepuscular glow across the surrounding piles of books and color-coded folders full of neat, cross-indexed notes. Spike walked over to the cot and turned the pillow over. Willow's scent lingered in the blankets, a day or two stale but still identifiable.

He was mad as hell at Willow, but he missed her already.

Buffy sat down at the desk and laid a hand on its surface, fanning the scattered papers out in front of her. "I still can't believe she's..." She wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve, a small-child gesture of loss.

Spike's knees went out and he found himself sitting on the cot. He ached all over, in every bone and ligament, but the sorest muscle he possessed right now was the unmoving one in his chest. "God, I'm sorry, Buffy..."

"It's not your fault!" she snapped, then pressed her fingers to her closed eyes with a small wounded noise. "She chose. She..." Buffy took a deep breath and opened her eyes. "I should have cut her head off right away. It'd be better than this waiting."

"No, you shouldn't." Spike leaned back against the cavern wall with a bitter snort. "Sire's right, that is."

Once upon a time in the alternate universe that was last summer, he'd sat up with Dawn on the roof of the Rosenbergs' house at one in the morning, and they'd talked about happy endings. There weren't any in real life, he'd said, because there weren't any endings. Things just kept happening. When you looked around the next corner, everything's fucked up again. Dawn had countered that at least that meant there was always a next corner to look around. He closed his eyes. Letting his guard down, but he didn't care. He was tired of looking round corners. Last night they'd saved the world, but things kept on happening.

"Will she rise tonight? If she... got enough?" Buffy kept shuffling through the papers on Willow's desk.

Spike rocked his head against the stone, slow and tired and helpless. "Could happen, but probably not till tomorrow night. 'S different for everyone." He'd never bothered to keep track of the averages. Since the debacle with his mother he'd never sired anyone he gave a piss about; what did he care when they rose, or if they rose at all? They were just minions, and like as not he or Dru would have killed them in a fit of temper before a month was out. They hadn't mattered. Willow... mattered.

Buffy leaned over the desk and rubbed her sleeve across her forehead, leaving a pale streak in the grime. "I wanted to save her," she whispered. She flipped open another folder and paged listlessly through its contents. "Just once, I wanted..." Her voice trailed off, and that funny little line appeared between her brows. "Spike...how well do you remember the spell Willow used to get your soul back the first time?"

Spike's eyes flicked open and he sat forwards again with a frown. "I remember the gist of it. Not word for word. Why?"

Her voice was taut and dangerous as a garrote. "Look at this."

Spike got up and circled the desk, looking over her shoulder and squinting to bring the small type into focus. The folder in her hands was labeled in Willow's tidy, draftsmanlike script: _Ritual of Restoration, Revised, Version 3.4._ The spell itself was only two-and-a-half typed pages, and half of that was the list of necessary components; the rest of the folder was filled with notes explaining why Willow was changing this line of the chant or substituting this herb for that, and detailing different patterns for laying out the components at different phases of the moon. He would have given a good deal for the use of Angelus's dead-on visual memory for five minutes, but even without...Spike let out a low whistle and tapped a line with a forefinger. "This bit here's different, and this. I think the patterns she's got the rubbishy bits laid out in are different, too, but I can't be certain there." He straightened with an admiring shake of his head. "She told me once she thought she could get around the happiness curse if she had the time."

Buffy stared at the folder, lips pursed, and it began to dawn on him what she was suggesting. Bloody brilliant, she was, and no mistake. Orbs of Thessulah were a dime a dozen; Anya probably had a crate of them tucked away in the Magic Box basement. They'd just do the spell, bring Will back to herself--well, perhaps not exactly herself, but...buggering hell. Spike drew a frustrated breath and let it go. "You sure about this, love?"

"No." She dropped the folder and buried her face in her hands. "I used to be sure about everything. I used to know exactly what was right and what was wrong. And why it was right and wrong. Now I'm not sure about anything, and it's like I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture, and I have to really _look_ at every single piece, trying to figure out if it's water or sky."

A half-smile lifted the corner of his mouth. "Welcome to my world."

What comfort he could offer might be cold, but better that than nothing. Spike draped an arm around her shoulders and Buffy leaned into his side, letting her fingers slide down his arm to curl around his wrist, a warm and living bracelet. "Tara... if Tara won't... well, then, we can't. But--" She picked the folder up again with shaking hands. "I can't not try. If she were just dead... but she's not. She's worse than dead. And here's a chance at getting Willow back. Really Willow, not just--"

"Really Willow stuffed into the same dead body as a demon," Spike interrupted. "I'm not saying no here, love; I'll take Red back any way I can get her, but I'm--" A vampire warning the Slayer about the possible dangers of black magic; Christ, what had the world come to? "The white hats wouldn't approve."

Buffy looked up at him with the other half of his smile, rueful and forlorn. "Didn't you get the memo? Not exactly a white hat any longer. More a tasteful ecru."

He gave her a squeeze. "Goes well with the off-grey, d'you think?"

*****

She rose out of deep water. It took a long time. Days. Maybe years. At first she floated upwards gently, almost imperceptibly, towards the surface, but towards the end she was fighting, struggling, kicking her way to freedom, agent of her own rebirth. Light and sound and scent burst upon her in an overwhelming, brilliant wave. Willow's eyes flew open, and she sat bolt upright in the bed, chest heaving in airless, exultant gasps. There were moments when everything was perfect. Like when you were a little kid, and you woke up in the morning and it was a Saturday in the middle of summer vacation, and the sun was shining and birds were singing and there were cartoons on, and you knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that you could do anything, anything at all. It was like that, waking up a vampire.

"...better hurry."

There were more voices, farther off, chanting something--Latin? She sucked at Latin, which had been embarrassing, once. She could scarcely hear them for all the other noises crowding on her ears--the discordant thump of multiple hearts, the creak and groan of pipes, the distant whoop of neighborhood kids in the street outside. Willow looked around her with wonder. Same old dresser, covered with an eclectic mix of makeup and magical trinkets, same old chair with Tara's blue sweater draped across it, same closet neatly divided between her clothes and Tara's. Each item was invested with new and iconic significance. The curtains were drawn, but the room was aglow nonetheless; to her new-made eyes, the darkest corners were laid bare down to the last dust bunny. No wonder Spike was so big on candles. Electric light was painfully bright to vampire eyes--her eyes, now.

Someone had bathed her and washed and combed her hair, stripped off her burnt and filthy clothes and replaced them with a clean nightgown, all fluffy pink flannel. Willow's lip curled in revulsion. That would have to go. She was so over the cuteness thing. But later. The air was thick with the smell of burning sage and...something else. Something _delicious._ It rose out of the sheets beneath her, the perfumes of Araby aged to rich mellow perfection, and wafted sharp and fresh and tangy across the room. Tara's scent. Blinding, all-consuming hunger blazed up in her, and Willow spun around on her hands and knees in the tangle of cream-colored linen, fixating on the origin of that divine odor.

Buffy was standing between the bed and the doorway, watching Willow with hooded eyes and the stone-faced expression which had grown so familiar last year. Her arms crossed over a stake. Behind her, in the threshold of the room, Tara was seated cross-legged on the floor, bent over a red velvet pillow holding a small glowing object. Giles and Spike flanked her, holding a sheaf of papers and a bundle of smoldering herbs respectively. A familiar arraignment of bones, stones and candles surrounded the pillow, but none of that mattered; the only thing in Willow's universe was the smell of fresh, living blood.

"...let the orb be the vessel..."

Tara, so beautiful in her determination and power, so vital, such a banquet of warm, tender flesh, all moist and salty-sweet with perspiration. Willow licked her lips, entranced by the mouth-watering throb of the pulse-point in her lover's neck. A twisting, pulling sensation shot through her brow and jaw, hurting in that good way it does when you rip off a scab. For a second her skin stretched too tight across her shifting bones, and then her new features settled into place. Willow ran her tongue across her fangs, and hissed as the unaccustomed pinpoints cut the flesh. The taste of her own blood only intensified the ache in her gut.

She flowed off the bed, moving like liquid silver across the floor. This was beyond cool. There was delightful anguish in Tara's blue-grey eyes, and her voice trembled with the effort of getting the words of her spell out. "Don't be thcared, honey," Willow cooed. "It'th jutht me." Ugh. She was going to have to do something about _that._

Buffy moved to block her, stake at effortless ready--if she was quicksilver, the Slayer was liquid steel, Terminator II-style. Behind Buffy, Spike lowered his head, his eyes glowing lantern-yellow beneath his gnarled brow. He bared his fangs and growled, a take-no-prisoners sound she knew instinctively for a warning rather than a challenge, and Willow had to laugh. Like she'd roll over and play adoring fledgling for a pathetic screw-up of a sire like him. He was such a dog in the manger. No intention of eating them himself, but was he going to offer his starving offspring a bite? Jerk. Maybe she could she grab Giles and snap his neck before one of them jumped her. It would be fun to try.

What an idiot she'd been to think of this as an ending. This was her true beginning. She felt free and light. Stronger than she'd ever been in her life. Utterly reborn.

For about three seconds.

"...anima instaubitur! Nunc!"

Tara's eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped forward, knocking over a candle or two before Giles caught her. The object on the pillow disappeared in a flare of white light, and a dozen spears of blinding pain impaled Willow from the inside out. She might have screamed, but there was no air in her lungs, and all she could do was pitch over in a shaking, spasming ball until the agony cooled from raging bonfire to glowing embers. It was back. All the guilt and horror, weighing her down with chains that could anchor a battleship, and all the worse for having lifted for a few moments.

"Willow?"

She couldn't even tell whose voice it was asking the question, her ears rang so. Willow looked up, shivering. Tara was staring at her with mingled hope and terror. Giles's face was a pallid mask of itself, and he was fingering his own stake. Buffy and Spike were twin sentinels, one thin-lipped and stone-faced, the other radiating a feral, territorial watchfulness. "You brought me back," she whispered. She'd cut her lip on her fangs, and her own blood spotted the pillow; on top of everything else she was still starving, every cell crying out for blood. Tears welled up in her golden eyes, big fat hopeless buckets of them. "You--" In a nonexistent heartbeat she gathered herself and sprang at Spike. "You brought me back! You BATHTARD! I HATE you! All of you! You rotten, creepy, awful--"

She slammed into him head-on, clawing at his face, screaming and wailing and running out of air half-way through her litany of PG-13 abuse, so that she puffed ineffectual soundless curses into his chest. Her newfound strength proved less than overwhelmingly effective against someone with a century's head start in same; Spike caught her wrists, yanked her arms up behind her back with one swift brutal motion, and ignored her wriggles and kicks with the aplomb of a lion enduring a cub chewing on his ears. He glanced over at the others. "She's wild, starved. Best you leave her to me for a bit, let me get some blood in her, and you come back in five or ten when she's more... herself."

"Are we certain the spell was successful?" Giles asked, with a cool note of inquiry which allowed a ray of hope into Willow's still heart--_he'd_ use that stake in a New York minute if he thought--

Spike gave Willow a little shake. "She's got her soul all right. She stinks of it."

Tara flinched and bit down hard on the knuckle of her thumb. "I should stay--"

Buffy took Tara's shoulder with a look of compassion and steered her towards the door. "It's a vamp thing. Let Spike calm her down. Come on. It won't be long." She shot an impenetrable look at Spike, who returned it in spades. Giles followed them out the door, looking somewhere in the neighborhood of Spike's age. As soon as they were gone, Willow twisted free and head-butted Spike in the stomach. Spike backhanded her full-strength across the face. Her head snapped back on her neck and violet stars exploded before her eyes. Willow staggered backwards, sprawling across the mattress, and before she could make another move Spike pounced, pinning her wrists over her head and holding her in place with his weight.

"Listen up, Red," he snarled, nose to flattened nose. "I'm your sire. Didn't ask for it, didn't want it, but here it is. If you've got any poncy sentimental notions about what that means, forget 'em. All it means is I'm older than you and I'm stronger than you and I'm always going to _be_ older and stronger than you, and if you take one step out of line, cause Buffy and the rest one more sleepless night, I'll feed you your fingers, one joint at a time. You wanted to be a vampire? Fine, you're a vampire. You don't get out of this so easily."

Willow said nothing, hating him, hating herself. She'd been here before, staring up into Spike's ferocious demon countenance, and this time--this time--

This time it didn't really hurt, except in a tingly excity sort of way. That was, the hitting part hurt, but it didn't really matter so much. Think about that--Spike had hit her. Hard. As hard as he'd hit another...Willow's face crumpled in grief, and she took an awkward, sobbing breath. The hatred cracked and shattered, its thin, bitter black shell falling away into a thousand tiny needle-sharp fragments and leaving her damp and draggled, a new thing, naked and exposed. "I'm a vampire. I'm really a vampire. Oh, God..."

Spike eased back a little, his hand sliding from wrists to shoulders, and after a bit, as Willow continued to sob, he wasn't holding her down any longer, just holding her. His hands had always been chilly--not freakishly icy, just the kind of chilly anyone's hands might be on a cold day, or when they'd lost circulation for a bit. Mouse-hand, Tara used to call it, when she'd been sitting at the computer too long in a non-ergonomic fashion. He didn't feel cold now, just... there. Their bodies were exactly the same temperature. Room temperature. She wasn't crying blood or something oogy like that, was she? Because ew, and also yuck, and thirdly, think of the dry-cleaning bills. No, no--vampires wept salt water like everyone else; she'd seen Spike do it often enough.

When at last her sobs wore themselves out in a series of exhausted hiccups, Spike eased her over onto one of the pillows, rolled off the bed and walked over to a small cooler tucked away beside the dresser. She heard the hollow _thup_ of the lid coming off, and the clink and rattle of ice cubes as he fished something out. A second later the mattress shifted as he sat down beside her. "Here," he said, holding out a Styrofoam cup with the Kohlermann's logo on the side and a straw. "Drink up. You'll feel better."

The pig's blood was cold, and something deep inside her was still screaming for _hot fresh living!_ but it was still the most wonderful thing she'd ever tasted. Like...like a Beef Wellington-flavored hot fudge Sunday, or, or, chocolate-covered deep-fried bacon cheesecake--there weren't even _ words_ for the yumminess. Willow sucked down the whole cup with ravenous dispatch, licked her fangs and grabbed the second container Spike had ready for her with embarrassing eagerness. He was right; as the raging hunger in her belly calmed, she couldn't help but feel a little better. Her bitten lip was already healing. It occurred to her that being dead was the first decent rest she'd had in weeks. And maybe the last.

Spike sat on the edge of the bed with one leg tucked under him, watching her drink, like he was grading her performance or something--was she doing this right? Did she have a blood mustache? Did she look like a big vampire dork? "Why?" she asked at last, setting the cup down and letting her eyes follow it. "Why did Buffy let you...?"

Spike's cheeks hollowed, and he made a small grumbly noise. "This was Buffy's idea, pet."

Instant karma. She'd dragged Buffy back from the dead; Buffy had just returned the favor. "There's thome petard-hoithting involved, huh?"

"Won't say there wasn't."

Willow turned the cup over, her thumbnail making little cornrows of crescent-moon indentations in the Styrofoam. They still looked the same, her hands, but across the room in the mirror over the dresser, there was no one there, just an eerily rumpled sheet. Makeup. How was she going to put on makeup? Because redhead, with serious foundation issues, and vampification wouldn't get rid of freckles. She'd wanted to erase herself; all she'd succeeded in doing was blinding herself. Spike jerked his head at the doorway. "By the pricking of my thumbs, something Wicca this way comes. You might want to put the fangs away."

"What?" Willow picked up the sound of shuffly feet and worried murmurs in the hall, and ran her fingers over her face, trying to push the brow ridges back in with panicky little hand-flutters. "How? What if I can't change back? What am I going to tell Mom and Dad? And _thchool?_ I have day clathes!" She grabbed his wrists and turned on him with a wail of anguish. "And I thound like I thould be thinging 'Gary, Indiana'!"

"Should have thought of that before you tried to make me your one-way ticket to oblivion," Spike said, not entirely unsympathetically. There was a darkling humor in his eyes. "Just relax and think thoughts unrelated to slaughter and mayhem." He extricated himself from her panicky grip, and got up to open the door.

It took a couple of tries, but she managed to wrestle herself back into human shape before Tara came in. Willow crumpled up the Styrofoam cup with its residue of sticky red and shoved it under the covers, overcome by the irrational terror that Tara would transform before her eyes into a giant lamb chop or something, like one of those cartoons where Elmer Fudd was starving on a desert island. But no--Tara looked like Tara. Drained, bewildered Tara, wheaten hair pulled back in an unflattering braid, dark half-circles smudged beneath her eyes by an artistic thumb. Arms crossed, hands tucked beneath her armpits, awkward and vulnerable as a Degas painting. Not quite sure how things had come to this. Tara at the end of a very long rope.

She wasn't going to get to bury her head in Tara's shoulder, and be told that everything was all right.

Spike gave Tara an awkward shoulder-pat and slipped out; Willow caught a glimpse of him taking Buffy's hand, and the two of them standing in the hall, forehead to forehead, whispering together. She wasn't yet accustomed enough to her new keenness of hearing to sift their words from the background noise. And besides... Tara.

"You let them bring me back," Willow said at last. "You helped."

Tara turned her head, her bones all too evident beneath her translucent skin. "I did," she whispered. "It's easy to say how wrong it is when it's someone else. When it's you...I...I d-don't think this was right. " Her eyes scrunched shut and she wrapped her arms around herself. "But it wasn't f-fair, what you did! To Spike. To all of us--to me! How could you do that to me? How could you m-make me k-kill you, Willow? When you know I love you so much, when--"

"All I wanted was to make things right! To fix everything. To--" Willow clutched the blankets, heard the startling noise of shredding cloth, and dropped them in sick dismay. "You can't love me. Not like this."

Tara's head came up, her mouth set in a line at odds with its essential softness. "Don't tell me what I can't do."

"I'm..." Willow stopped. Sorry didn't cut it, not any longer. But she was sorry; she was composed entirely of sorry molecules. She was Sorry Woman and her sidekick Apology Lass. What could she possibly say that would show she meant it this time? She drew an unsteady breath--so much harder, when you had to think about doing it every single time. "I'm giving up the magic. So you know. All of it."

Tara's eyes dropped, veiled behind sandy lashes. "That's...Willow, y-you're a vampire. You're dead. You're never going to change again. Which means your magic's never coming back any more than it is right now. Like--like Drusilla, she's never saned up."

No magic. Not rejected in an act noble self-abnegation, just...gone. Nothing but the dry, empty ache inside, forever. Willow bent her head to her flannel-covered knees. "I guess that's poetic justice. And not just a couple of limericks, either. A whole epic. Childe Willow to the Dark Tower came."

"I wouldn't have wished that on you." Tara's breath was soft and ragged in the room's silence, her heartbeat strong and swift. How strange to hear the sounds of life so clearly now that she was dead. "You know that. But you didn't give me the live Willow choice. You gave me two flavors of dead Willow. I--"

"I'm not blaming you. I think I've kinda given up my blaming rights for eternity."

"It's not the magic, Willow." Tara's fingers twined in frustration. "It was never the magic. It was how you used it. You could go out right now and try to conquer the world as--as a computer hacker."

_I wanted to make things right._ But it wasn't things that were wrong. It was her. It was herself she had to fix. She should get up. She wasn't an invalid--or if she was, it was only a moral one. Willow swung her legs off the bed, thin white ankles protruding from the pink flannel, and started for the door, only to stop...well...dead after a single step. One of the curtains had been knocked askew, and a pale line of winter sun threw a paper-thin wall of light across the room.

Spike had walked right through it on his way out. Like someone passing their finger through a candle flame, Willow guessed; do it fast enough and you were safe. But Spike was older and tougher than she was, and her knees were shaking. She looked beseechingly at Tara, but Tara only leaned against ths doorframe, sad-eyed and motionless, and Willow realized that Tara was not going to come to her. They were five feet and all the world apart. Distance she'd put between them, and Tara was not going to close it. And if Tara wouldn't do it...

How much worse than any loss of magic would be remaining the person she was now? "You're wrong," Willow said, "About me not being able to change. I know a vampire who did." She closed her eyes, and stepped through the fire. When she opened them, Tara was staring at her through the veil of smoke rising from her own skin.

*****

"...I mean, it just got me thinking. Vampires go all the way back to the Neolithic, right, so why crosses? Why not stars of David? Why not ankhs? If you turn the cross sideways, does--"

"Christ, Will, give it a rest! No wonder Angelus beat me black and blue at every opportunity!" Spike bounded up the porch steps ahead of Willow, jingling slightly--his Christmas present from Buffy was a black leather motorcycle jacket, which he was apparently determined to break in by the simple expedient of never taking it off. Tara had seen the discarded tag for a second before Spike had rescued it from the piles of wrapping paper the next morning:--=To Spike: This one's for bringing a Slayer back to life. Love, Buffy.

Tara followed the two vampires up onto the porch, her hands tucked into her sweater pockets and her head down. After the crisis which had ensued when Xander announced that he still wanted Willow to be his best man... woman...vampire...had been weathered, the wedding had gone off with only a few minor hitches. Xander's father had been drunk and disorderly, as usual, and one of his cousins had been caught with one of the bridesmaids in the janitor's closet at the reception. An ex-victim of Anya's vengeance days showed up and tried to disrupt the ceremony. Nothing out of line for a Sunnydale wedding, when you thought about it. After Buffy and Spike dispatched the former Stewart Burns, things had gone off...well. Ceremony. Bouquet-throwing. Photos. Reception, cake, dancing. Wary detente between Xander's family and Anya's demon associates. Anya holding Xander's hands and laughing, spinning his wheelchair around to the strains of Garth Brooks. Xander's cousin Carol flirting with anything that breathed and a few things that didn't. Buffy and Spike superglued to one another in the blue light, swaying together in their own schmoopy little world. _Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance..._

She'd danced like that with Willow once, the two of them caught up in one another to the exclusion of all the rest of the universe. Dancing on air. There'd been no dancing for the two of them tonight; Willow'd gotten sick after trying to eat a slice of wedding cake and spent the next hour heaving up her guts in the ladies' restroom.

Buffy and Dawn crowded up onto the porch behind her, giggling madly. "...come on, you thought the horns were cute, didn't you?"

"So not!" Dawn protested, laughing. "You're the freaky demon-lover in the family."

"Dawnie's got a boyfriend!" Buffy chanted. She'd had maybe one more glass of champagne than was good for her. "Agh, get the door open, we have to escape the evil clutches of these dresses!" She waved at the offending garment, a bright green sheath which exploded into a profusion of ruffles in the most inconvenient places, and made spooky woo-woo theramin noises. "It's the invasion of the asparagus people!"

"You birds got off easy," Spike grumbled as he unlocked the front door. Spike had his own key now. "I was stuck being Roller Boy's chair caddy all night. I fucking hate those things."

"I hope there's wheelchair access gambling in Vegas," Willow said. "I gave him a quarter to bet for me."

Tara hung her sweater on an unoccupied hook as they trooped through the foyer. Dawn hitched up her skirts, yelled "Dibs on the bathroom!" and made a dash upstairs, followed closely by Buffy. Knowing from experience that letting the Summers sisters fight it out for hot water access was the better part of valor, everyone else dispersed into the living room. Spike divested himself of tie and suit jacket in record time, flopped down on the couch, grabbed the TV remote, and started flipping channels. Willow sat down in the armchair. After a moment she gave Tara a hopeful smile, and made a scootchy little sideways motion that said _share?_

Tara smiled back, nervous, but made no motion to sit down. "I--I need to get the dress off," she said. Willow's face fell, but she picked her smile up and pasted it back in place over her disappointment. Tara hurried upstairs and lingered over changing into a shapeless pullover and skirt as long as she could manage--which still wasn't a patch on Buffy, who was still in the bathroom when Tara finally forced herself downstairs again.

Everyone was still there; Dawn and Spike were wrestling for the remote and Willow had pulled her laptop out and was checking the end of one of her eBay auctions. It was all back to normal, wasn't it? _Except that Xander may never walk again and Willow's dead._ Tara swallowed, pried her fingers off the bannister, and started across the room. She could do this. She could. She was the calm one who always had it together, right? Willow was really trying. She needed help, and...OK. She could sit down. In the chair. With Willow. Touching Willow.

Willow's nervous, goofy little smile was still the same. She set the computer aside and shifted around so Tara could have half the chair, Willow's right leg draped over Tara's left. Willow's nose brushed her ear for a second. Was Willow _smelling_ her? Was that a normal human shifting-position grunt or a creepy vampire noise? Willow settled back and Tara forced her tense muscles to relax. There. This wasn't so bad. She could put an arm around Willow's shoulder. Pull Willow's head against hers. Just like they used to do. _ Except Willow's chest doesn't rise and fall against her any longer, and Willow's heart doesn't beat in tandem with her own._

It would be okay, Tara told herself. She just had to ease into this.

"I've been working on what to tell my parents," Willow said. Her sharp inhalation to get the air to talk with made Tara's heart race. "I'm thinking porphyria." She nodded. Decisive Willow. "It's got pedigree, you know? Madness of King George, and plus? Versatile. All-purpose explanation for vampire OR werewolf."

"That might work," Tara said cautiously. Except that Willow's hand, tentatively resting on her arm, was still as chilly as the night outside had been.

Spike snorted. "Easier to tell 'em the truth."

Willow's eyes went saucery and she made a panicked little meeping noise. "Are you kidding? This is my _mom._ If I tell her I'm a vampire she'll just start talking about Sheridan LeFanu and the id and open the curtains on me or something."

Tara's fingers tightened on the arm of the chair, raising little clouds of upholstery dust from the worn brown fabric. _Except Willow had almost gone up in flames stepping through a stray sunbeam._

Buffy tripped downstairs, wiping the last of the cold cream from her face; stripped of makeup, the only trace of last week's battle was a thin silver scar across her left cheekbone. She'd exchanged the chartreuse nightmare of a bridesmaid's dress for sweats, floppy pink T-shirt and toe socks. She swung round the newel post and back into the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, "You want anything, Spike?"

Spike looked up from his doomed search for meaning amidst the wasteland of after-midnight cable TV. "Yeh, long as you're up. Ooh, _Changing Rooms."_

Just an offhand thing, the way Buffy made the offer, the way Spike accepted it. Like it was normal. Willow perked up slightly. There hadn't been any blood at the wedding; at some point, Anya had given up on trying to satisfy the diverse dietary needs of her guests and gone with the chicken Kiev. "Maybe I could keep something down now," Willow said, with just the tiniest hint of wistful in her voice. "I think it was the buttercream that got me."

Tara remonstrated with herself. She should get up. She should offer to get her poor queasy lover (whom she hadn't touched in a week) some blood, because Willow was probably hungry (and could go wild and tear someone's throat out). She sat there, frozen.

Buffy emerged from the kitchen a minute or two later, set her coffee down on the nearest coaster and handed Spike his mug like it was Columbia's finest instead of stinking slaughterhouse run-off. She curled up beside him on the couch to thumb through the UC Sunnydale course catalog. Spike took a swallow of pig's blood and Buffy stretched up to kiss him. Her lips met his without the slightest flinch and came away tinged with red. Spike grinned and bent to lick the blood from her mouth. Tara's belly clenched. Buffy grinned back, and pulled his shirt up to blow raspberries on his stomach. Spike growled and rolled her over, and they were wrestling like kids, Buffy shrieking "No fair, no fair!" until they thumped off the couch and onto the floor and Tara couldn't take it any longer. She leaped to her feet and pressed her hands to her mouth to keep the screams inside and fled sobbing out into the night.

*****

Buffy caught up with Tara half a block down Revello Drive; she was slumped against a winter-bare mulberry tree, her face buried in her arms, shoulders shaking. Sobs fell like mulberry leaves, thin and dry and tissue-paper fragile. "I can't do it. I c-can't. I still l-love her, I love her so m-much, but--she's dead." Uncomprehending grief underscored each word, a mourning for something she hadn't lost. "Willow's dead. I can feel it, every second. She doesn't breathe. She's cold all the time. I k-keep thinking--if I reach out and t-touch her, she'll be stiff. I keep waiting to smell the decay." She looked up at Buffy with swimming, reddened eyes and blinked tears away. "I'm afraid to get in the same bed with her because I keep th-thinking--I'm lying here next to a corpse. How do you d-do it, Buffy?"

Buffy jammed her hands deeper into the pockets of her yummy new shearling jacket--"For extra protection on those cold nights," Spike had said as she ripped the gold and silver wrapping paper off, with a tongue-curl that would have turned 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' into base innuendo. She scattered a drift of crackling brown leaves with the toes of one boot. "Just lucky enough to be born a kinky demon-infested necrophiliac, I guess."

Tara slid down the tree with a little moan. "I d-didn't mean it like that!"

"I know." Buffy sat down beside her with a sigh. The ground was damp and cold beneath its sparse covering of winter-killed grass. "I guess it helps that I never knew Spike or Angel when they were alive, but..." She'd thought Angel was alive when she'd first met him, though. Tara's reaction was one that she had the feeling she could never really understand; the difference between dead and undead was a palpable thing to her. Spike could be still as unbreathing stone and she could still _feel_ him humming along her nerve endings. Tara didn't have that, but she had other sensitivities, which were just as revolted at the presence of the undead as a Slayer's senses were excited. "It's... not the body. It's what's inside." She ventured a conspiratorial smile. "Besides, even the body part's not bad once you get used to it. The growling? Wicked sexy. And come July, believe me, lack of body temperature becomes a major selling point."

Tara shuddered. "I'll never get used to it," she said--not complaining, just a flat statement of fact. "I won't give up on her. As a friend, as--I just don't know if I can... be with her."

"I don't know if..." _If she can be without you,_Buffy thought, but didn't finish saying. The tension between Willow and Tara had taken a different shape than she'd imagined it would, and she wasn't sure if she could see the details well enough to poke at it without losing a finger.

By the time she coaxed Tara back to the house and delivered the damp and sniffly witch to the threshhold of her and Willow's room, the living room was deserted, and she could hear faint snores from Dawn's room. Buffy waited outside the door until she heard the soft interplay of voices inside, then went down the hall to the bathroom to grab a couple of Advil. The pleasant buzz she'd brought home from the reception champagne had transmuted itself into a slight headache. She shook the tablets into one hand and washed them down, staring thoughtfully at Mirror-Buffy. It was getting harder and harder to remember that Tara's reaction was the normal one.

Spike was waiting for her in her bedroom, lounging on top of the covers in nothing but his spectacles and a copy of _Naked Lunch._ Buffy wrinkled her nose; his idea of what constituted a good bedtime read was a far greater obstacle to potential happiness than the not-breathing thing. "You left the seat up."

He tipped his glasses down the aquiline length of his nose and surveyed her over the rims. "I use the loo twice a week, tops. Deal with it."

"I see the honeymoon is over." Buffy unfastened the clips from her hair and shook it down over her shoulders, turning on him with a stern look and an admonishing wave of her brush. "You will be punished suitably for the transgression, of course."

Spike closed his book with a slow, salacious grin, set his glasses on the nightstand, and stretched, all muscle and impudence. "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but whips and chains excite me. Tara all right?"

"Yeah. Well, no, but the hyperventilating's stopped." Buffy gave her hair one last stroke, stripped off her t-shirt, and crawled into bed beside him. She spent a minute playing with the settings on the electric blanket--one of the dual control ones, another Christmas present. They'd discovered by trial and error that keeping Spike's side on low kept him warm enough to alleviate the vampire heat sink effect. "I don't know what to do about it, and as far as vampire/human relationship counseling goes, it's either us with our record-breaking three-and-a-half weeks together, or the nearest vamp brothel."

Spike burrowed down under the blankets with a rumble of content and made himself at home with her body, wrapped around her like an affectionate boa constrictor. "Will's not in the best place herself," he murmured into her hair. His hand fitted itself to the curve of her hip, thumb inscribing little circles along the sacral arch. "Terrified she's going to bite the chit by accident." Genuine puzzlement crept into his voice. "She's got her soul. All she's got to do is listen to it."

"You may have forgotten this part, but sometimes? They don't talk all that loud." Buffy traced the knotted white scar tissue spiderwebbing his chest, watching the little quivers and twitches of his muscles beneath the tender new skin. "I hate to see a little thing like death come between a couple."

He chuckled and for awhile they lay in comfortable silence, curled up warm and drowsy together in the nest of blankets while Spike played with her tits--it was hard to get worked up about those few extra pounds when he was enjoying them so much. She should tell Tara about the electric blanket trick; it was the little things, sometimes, that made all the difference. Spike morphed into game face, rubbing one cheek and then the other against her breasts, the wild, deep vibration in his chest intensifying as her fingers massaged the convolutions of bone across his brow.

Buffy shifted position to capture Spike's face in her hands, watching the fangs recede and the sunrise gold of his eyes shade into midday blue. How could Tara not go for this? She felt a lingering doubt that she'd done the right thing. Willow deserved the chance to make amends...but would the stake have been kinder, in the end? _No. Not this time._ She had other gifts to give than death. _Listen. Watch. It can be good, I promise. Not better, not worse, just different. I can tell you how to make her purr..._

"You happy, love?" Spike murmured, thumbing a nipple.

"Mmmm?" She lipped the line of his jaw. "I am a very happy Buffy. What brings that on?"

He pulled her a little closer, fingers stroking up and down her upper arm with that light, sure touch that made her tingle in all the right places. And all the wrong ones. Equal-opportunity tingles. "Ah, well...Harris's wedding and all, got me thinking..."

He wasn't going to say something stupid about him being a vampire and her not, and it never working, was he? Oh, God, he was going to say exactly that because they always said that. And then ran off to L.A. when the apocalypse was over. Either Spike was running behind schedule or Anya's wedding must count as a minor apocalypse. Spike was looking at her, all earnest and Victorian, face at complete odds with the things his hands were doing. "You gave up a lot to be here with me, Buffy-love. Heaven, and...and so forth. The rest you'd earned. Felt you had to stay here to keep saving this sorry old world, because you're the Slayer. It bothers me, sometimes. Wish I felt worse about having you here, but I don't."

Relief washed over her in _Point Break_-sized waves, and Buffy almost laughed--but didn't, because Spike sounded so serious. "So you feel guilty about not feeling guilty?"

Spike propped his head up on one hand, mildly disgruntled, a stray curl skewing over one eye. "Well... yeh, when you put it that way, it sounds a bit daft."

She kissed the tip of his nose. "Well, stop it. I'm not saving the world because I'm the Slayer. I'm saving the world because... because I'm Buffy."

He rolled her over, eyes dancing. "Ah, I see. Big difference."

She'd told Dawn once the hardest thing in life was to live in it, and she hadn't changed her mind about that, but she'd forgotten the important part. The harder something was, the better it felt when you finally started to get it right. "Actually? Yeah, it is."

_They lived together for eight wonderful years, until_\--

Soft, sex-drenched growl. Heavy-lidded cornflower eyes. "What d'you think you're doing, Slayer?"

_Until..._

Limited ethics, and infinite heart.

Neither one of them was who they'd been, and it remained to be seen what they were becoming. She had no idea how it would end. Only the conviction that, doom or joy, they'd be facing it together. Buffy lifted her mouth to his, tasting...mint-flavored toothpaste. And underneath, always, the hint of blood and smoke, of something wild and dangerous and _hers._

"Getting it right," she whispered.

_ **Not anywhere near** _

  
The End


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